Curse
by Ereshkigaal
Summary: Vampires are timeless creatures. How will they deal with change that affects not only those around them, but also themselves? Rated T for snarky A/Ns.
1. Eternity

A/N:  
*sigh* Fuck, what in holy sweet young Jesus Christ's fuck banana's name am I doing? I've written shit before, but this one is totally gonna take the cake. A Twilight fanfic. *shudder* And not just a normal one, but a far-out one. Imagine Leah as a vampire and Rose as a werewolf. Both the traditional kind (well, more or less), not sparkly faggery. See? That's where I'm going. So grab your Pocky and your copy of Breaking Dawn, and hold on tight to your filthy, sweat-drenched cat ear headband and your fangirl photo of R-Patts, because here I go.  
~Eresh, the scourge of litterature

P.S. Of course I don't write like Smeyer. No one of you do. If you are so devoted to the Queen of Suethors as to demand all fanfic authors to write just like her, this is not for you.  
This is not a fic meant to be a continuation of Twilight – more a molestation – so I'll just pull my own shit out of the bottomless Goatse-hole that serves as my fount of creativity.

Curse, a - what have I done? - Twilight fanfic.

P.P.S. Curse, Eresh's unholy pile of profane words, now in an edited version. I tried to weed out the solid-blocks-of-text that had plagued the first ten chapters for a year now, and I sneaked in a couple of rewordings and new sentences. No matter how much I hate to admit it, there were also a couple of oops moments here and there, mostly in the grammar and spelling departments.

Chapter 1: Eternity

My Edward. Not just for eighty years. Forever. It's still hard to believe, but here I was, sitting with him and my new family, the Cullens.  
All the worries I'd had when I was human, the blurry fears of death or sickness, were gone. The Volturi weren't bothering us anymore. I had Renesmee. Nothing to worry about.

"Bella?" Edward's voice was concerned, which brought up murky memories of control and frustration. "We should go hunting. Charlie's throwing the family party tomorrow, remember?" Of course I remembered. "Oh, yeah. Let's go." The hunt had transformed in feeling and difficulty over the past year. Now, it was just something we did.  
We jumped out of the second-floor window, effortlessly, a routine movement. The river was something like a small trickle of water on the ground now, something that was easily passable. We lost ourselves in the hunt together, only snapping back from the predator's mindset when we entered the house again. Emmett and Jasper were watching a ball game, between two teams I neither knew nor cared for. Rosalie was reading some shallow fashion magazine, with Esme curiously reading over her shoulder, and Carlisle was helping out Sam and Leah after a quite serious fight they'd had.  
Alice was away for the night, sampling the new culture subset of Las Vegas. Even though she'd said it was curiosity, I'd seen her eyes when she told me, and I knew she was trying to feel human, as she must have had felt before all her memories had slipped away. Renesmee was sleeping over at her friend Lily's house, together with Anne, who was a year older. Nessie - no, Renesmee - was good at making friends, and now that the fear of the Cullens was over, she was swarmed by the children of Forks every day. Half a year ago, Carlisle had admitted to the townspeople that we were "different", and in an unusual commanding tone, told them that those who didn't like that could leave. None had left.  
Of course, the year had had its complications. It had turned out that Renesmee actually was venomous. Even though her venom had been slower than Edward's when I was dying fourteen months ago, and that Jacob was too strong to feel any effect from her diluted venom, she'd still been overcome once, at Lily's house. Luckily, she was closer to Renesmee than to us, but we'd still had to convince her parents that Nessie was harmless.  
"Bella? You're spacing out." Rosalie. Jake and Rose still had a very strained relationship, but she'd softened up, even towards Leah. "Oh? Yeah, maybe." "Bella, you should get something to do. Carlisle reads, and Edward and me play the piano. You can learn it too." I'd gotten that a lot. Music simply isn't me, no matter how much I try. I like listening to it, but playing just can't hold my interest for long. "Sorry. I've tried, you know. It's just not something I can spend a whole night doing." Rosalie's mouth twitched in a tiny smile. "Maybe you could go join up with Alice. You know what she's doing at the time."

Parties. Lots of people. Not me at all. "Mmm, still not me. Guess I'll just have to be bored for half of eternity." I smiled, but it was still quite worrying. "You really should. She's not very talkative at the moment, so maybe you could run to Vegas and try to cheer her up. It's not even midnight yet."  
Argh. She knew I couldn't resist guilt trips. "Well, fine. I really don't like seeing her unhappy. Edward?" He turned his head from across the room, by the TV with Jasper and Emmett. "It's not a problem with me, Bella. Now that you can deal with the trouble you always seem to attract, it's fine." He flashed the crooked smile that I'd never get tired of.  
"Okay. I'll be going, then. Bye, all."


	2. Mary Brandon

A/N: This is getting fun.

Chapter 2: Mary Brandon

I didn't even need a car.  
Even with my grotesquely fast "after" car, the trip to Vegas would still cost me most of the night. Instead, I flashed out the door in a graceful shimmer - at least my speed and strength would never get boring - and started running south. No one would see me, no matter where they were looking. Everyone who thought they saw something would have lost me before they got a chance to look again.  
About halfway down there - it only took me half an hour - I began running along the coast, moving so fast I was almost skimming over the water. After half an hour more, I reached L.A. and started to run inland. A weird kind of jetlag kicked in when I stood a couple of miles from the glittering, flashing city.  
Could it be true that I'd ran from Washington State to southern Nevada in only an hour and a bit? That shouldn't be physically possible. An ecstatic smile spread across my face as I began running towards the city. Not only was I actually impossible to explain using science, I was also capable of doing things that science had labeled impossible.  
Even though I'd never been in Vegas before, not even seen that many pictures of it, the place was exactly as I'd expected. A mess of lights that made my skin softly glow and ripple with neon colors, huge surrealistic buildings rising from the desert ground and a thick miasma of cigarette smoke, sweat, aftershave and alcohol, each smell battering against my senses with a choking intensity. That would make it harder to catch Alice's smell, though it wasn't common in this city.  
I discreetly sniffed around for the telltale scent of flowers, spices, clean clothes and the slight, unmistakable and disturbingly clinical sting of hospital, while walking down the crowded streets, ignoring the admiring glances of onlookers, mostly men, but also some truly beautiful women. I felt a flash of pride as I realized what they were feeling was jealousy, and then annoyance that I had to be the center of attention. It was Alice's fault, only giving me clothes that you'd see in a fashion magazine.  
I'd gotten used to ignoring the details of all the clothes she'd bought me, just to avoid getting exasperated. The dress I was wearing now was black and loose enough not to rip as I'd covered about half of the way across the States in an hour. It was still hard to believe, that I could -  
There. I smelled the sterile tang of old-fashioned hospital from a classy glass building two blocks down. Casually strolling down the street, being careful not to begin running, I made my way down there, and, not even bothering to read the name of the place, I walked up to the bouncer and fixed him with a demanding glare. He placed three fingers pensively on his chin, looking me over one too many times, and stepped aside to let me in.  
The lounge inside was even more classy and modern than the building, a sculpted piece of stainless steel and fiberglass forming the bar, and low, rounded plastic chairs made up for barstools. Alice was sitting in one of the chairs, chatting absent-mindedly to a black-haired man in his twenties, who seemed equally disturbed and fascinated by her twitchy, birdlike body language. When I'd taken two steps inside, she whipped her head around at a disturbing speed, smiled at me and motioned for me to come and sit down.  
Shooing the man away with a quick wave of her hand, she turned her chair towards me and began to talk in a low, urgent voice. "Bella. I needed to talk to you." Always to the point, maybe too fast. "First tell me what you're doing here. Rose's dead worried." Alice frowned and deliberated my words for a moment before answering. "I'm just trying to get a taste of how people around my physical age are living right now. I really never grew mentally beyond the twenty." She smiled, something that made her look warm and likable, the perfect best friend.  
"They're having so much fun, I almost wish I could join them. As it is, I have to make do with faking." She gestured towards a near-finished martini on the bar, a fancy, simplistic cocktail that looked like it had cost way too much for a bit of alcohol and an olive. "I almost understand how they can drink them. Almost. It's better when you have a goal with it, and when it doesn't feel afterwards like you've been drinking cement."  
The smile on her face spread into a large, self-ironic grin that faded again just as quickly. "But I need to tell you. I've seen something really disturbing. About in a week from now, all the possible fates for us simply vanish. We're not gonna die, that's a different feeling, but this is honestly scaring me."


	3. Unresolved

A/N: I'm getting to like this. Odd, but true.

Chapter 3: Unresolved

I was shocked. Alice seeing something like that? I took an unnecessary breath to steady myself and looked her in the eyes. She wasn't lying. Why would she lie about something like that, anyway? "Give me the details. I don't want to work everyone into a panic when I get home." I sounded much calmer than I was, which Alice must have had noticed, as she relaxed, leaned back in the chair and toned her voice down.  
"Bella, we're not gonna die. I said so already. Whatever it is, it can't be worse than that. But on the other hand - Bella, would you stop that? An odd, metallic noise was grating in my ears, and I realized it was coming from my nails cutting into the hard skin of my palms. "Oops." If I could still have blushed, I would be completely red-faced by now.  
"Doesn't matter. We'll have to wait it out. As it is, I can feel something on the edges of my consciousness now, but it's too early to see exactly what it is. So anyway, should we go home now?" I'd planned on staying a bit longer with her, but now it was probably best to return. Even with my memory, the trip home was blurry and indistinct, suppressed fear lashing at the inside of my head with every step I took. Alice was our lifeline, the only way we could plan our moves in the more chaotic periods of our existence. About halfway to Forks, I began thinking about possible causes.  
The Quileute? That seemed a convincing reason for all of two minutes, and I forced it to remain in my head for three more. But gradually, I began realizing that I was deceiving myself. For that - or Nessie and Lily - to be a possible explanation, the werewolves would have to play a role in all our lives, at the exact same moment, in a way that we couldn't avoid, no matter what we did. Impossible. When we were nearing Forks, I forced the annoying thoughts out of my head and began focusing on Charlie's family party. It was about one o' clock at night, which left me with a lot of time to waste.  
The night went faster than I'd expected. Edward and I spent about six hours in the cottage's bedroom. Even though I'd won the wager with Emmett, I could still hear his booming laughter all the way from the house. I decided to ignore it.  
Another two hours passed watching Renesmee while she was sleeping, admiring every single detail in her glossy hair, even as a cold, foggy Forks dawn broke above the pine trees. Nessie, Edward and me walked through the forest for the next five hours. Renesmee never got bored once, instead following us from above, leaping from tree to tree and once in a while bursting into excited giggles while me and Edward studied every single animal, every single plant and every odd landscape formation, finding fascinating patterns in the most unassuming things.  
By four o' clock, when we got back from the walk, Charlie's party had already started over at his house. Odd how it was so easy not to call it "my house" anymore. I should've thought into the conspiratory smile on Alice's face as we drove there in Edward's Volvo, crammed together in an oddly familiar, human way, because when we pulled up to the house, I realized that there was no way Charlie would have organized all this by himself.  
"Family" at least seemed to have a very loose definition in this context, as the cars parked all around were clearly not just close family. Inside, I found out that Alice had helped invite everything that could possibly be called family, together with the families of people who'd married into the Swans and close friends of just about every family member present.  
Later, through the mess of shouting, eating, chattering and gossip, I found out that she'd volunteered to let some of the guests sleep in our house, a logical idea, since the amount of people had passed the hundred at about six o' clock, and now, after two more hours spent unwillingly talking to obscure relatives, tolerating various friends of the family undressing me with their eyes and working up the courage to eat something - like Alice had said, it tasted well enough, but afterwards, it stuck in my stomach, and I had to suppress the urge to throw up - the amount was pushing a hundred and fifty.  
Even later, I stuck to small-talk with my close family - Charlie, the Cullens and a slightly freaked-out Renee - as the rest had emptied the scarce wine on the tables and were beginning to do beer runs with everyone from the age of twelve. The night passed easily with that, and I realized that I could get pretty close to sleep by just lying down alone, relaxing and not worrying about Alice's words.


	4. Waiting

A/N: Man, I hate this chapter. It's overly emo, irrelevant and the result of a plot seed that never took off. The only reason I'm even keeping it in is that I shoehorned a bit of plot into it, and I'm too lazy to rewrite chapters 3 and 5 to accommodate that.

Chapter 4: Waiting

About five o' clock in the morning, when the party had started to burn out, I could no longer expand the noise to fill my entire head, displacing all the anxiety. I already knew we weren't going to die, but still. As I'd learned the hard way, some things easily get way too close to that for comfort. Maybe I'd have to live through the burning again. Maybe it'd hurt as much as when Edward left. It could maybe even be worse than when the Volturi were coming to kill Renesmee.  
I gasped and sat up in my old bed at an unnatural speed. A little squeal escaped my lips, and I stood up and began to pace around the room at a frantic pace. My chest felt oddly empty, as if someone had ripped a hole through my ribs and out through my back. I knew this feeling too well, and I'd hoped I would never have to feel it again. When I was still human, this was the feeling I'd get every time I was thinking about things that were far too hard and painful to comprehend.  
I kept obsessively flashing back and forth between my bed and the door, trying to drown out the unwelcome thoughts with physical activity. Once in a while, a surreally clear and melodious shriek exploded from deep in my chest. I kept it low enough not to wake Renee, who was sleeping on a mattress by the wall, but even that demanded more self-control than it had meeting Charlie a year ago. But someone had to hear it, and I wasn't as much afraid to tell them than I feared I would react.  
Luckily, I couldn't blush or cry anymore. Not even bleed. Somehow, the thought deepened my frustration and fear, and a moment later, Alice barged in the door, disturbingly silent. "What's the matter, Bella?" she whispered in a tone that held as much poorly-veiled pity as it did compassion.  
I decided to get it out. If anyone would understand, it had to be Alice. Not Rose. She was too bitter, and every time I talked to her, she somehow managed to change the subject to her own story. "Sorry if I'm wasting your time, but I just can't seem to grasp what you saw. It's-"  
"Really. Stop avoiding the question." Her words sounded unexpectedly crude, hiding a hint of panic and something more nebulous, something harsh and impatient.  
"Okay... I'm afraid." Alice's face flattened into a frown, and she exhaled loudly and glanced down at her fingers for a split second before answering. "That's no problem. I'm scared too. Even more now, when I can see who's behind this."  
"Who?", I wheezed in a voice that actually managed to sound breathless. Somehow, irony always came back to haunt me in the wrong situations.  
"Aro. His mental fingerprint is all over my vision. Seems like he just won't leave us alone." I inhaled in shock, and shivered at the thought that I'd never look scared again, even though this - Aro trying to get to us again, veiling Alice's sight, maybe trying to kill us all - tore through my stomach and chest like my lifeless organs were melting into white-hot iron inside me. I actually thought I felt something in my cheeks, like a blush. Alice kept her gaze fixed on me, a mixture of frustration and unfocused anger dancing in her - unsurprisingly - already almost-black eyes. When I thought she was going to take the anger out on me, the odd feeling intensified, and I felt a tickling sensation under my eyes. Her mouth fell open in surprise, her expression showing worry, fear and a look of recognition. "Alice... what's bothering you?", I managed to squeeze out between the reflexive, panicked contractions of my chest. "Look in the mirror. After that, I'll get Carlisle to talk to you." I was just about to ask what she meant by "talking to Carlisle" when I looked in the mirror on the closet. My cheeks had actually taken on a flush, but it wasn't a healthy, rosy blush. My face was still pale, but red lines snaked up my cheeks and up to my eyes, giving me a sickly look. Where the lines ended, small drops of blood were beading on my eyelids. Alice picked me up while I stood stunned in front of the mirror, and lifted me over her shoulder without any problems. It seemed like she'd seen this before. Almost as if she'd read my anxiety, she started explaining while she began running towards the house, the window not even being an obstacle. "Happens once in a while. Specifically, Rose had it a lot in the beginning.", she told me in an urgent voice. "Not physically dangerous. But it must really be bad to provoke that reaction. That's why we need to talk to him. Can't afford to ruin your life when we need it the most."  
I thought I saw her smirking a bit there, a bitter grimace with a hint of glee shining through.


	5. Reconciliation

Chapter 5: Reconciliation

A/N: The original chapter didn't have an A/N, but while editing it, I felt that the space at the top of the document looked a bit lonely. Just goes to show that I've picked up a few tics through the process of writing this thing.

The days began passing much faster from then on. After a quick, formal talk with a concerned Carlisle, somehow all the problems seemed to fade into the background - with a little help from Jasper, but I was too preoccupied with not caring to get angry at him.  
The days and nights spent with my family seemed to pass again, and I sometimes found that I had no words for immortality. I wasn't going to die. All the minor depressions and moping I had wasted precious hours of my life on back when I was ...alive, had no base now.  
The only real worry of humans was no matter to me anymore.  
But still, no amount of optimism or Jasper's emotional manipulation could push away the reverse of the situation. What would I do in a few decades, when my family and friends were aging and dying? Should I risk taking away their souls, as was Edward's perpetual worry? I spent four nights - the thought that the next could be my last terrified me beyond all reason, so I avoided the thought - lying on my back in bed, vaguely missing sleep, thinking about that and other things, things that I would be better off suppressing.  
The morning of Thursday - not "the last day", not "the last day" - everyone had completely dropped the habitual human charade. Alice seemed to have told everyone, and the miasma of stress in the spacious house was palpable. Edward was staring out the window, unmoving, and Carlisle and Esme just sat by the table and stared worriedly into each other's' eyes. Alice and Jasper were outside, probably talking. It hurt to think of how Alice had to be feeling for telling the others. Emmett was uncharacteristically restless, pacing around the living room and up and down the stairs, while Rosalie, who normally avoided any proof of her state that she could, was venting her frustration on the trees across the river. In my detached state on the couch, I wondered what the werewolves would think of it.  
Oh. The Quileute. Jacob. I hadn't thought about what would happen to him and his pack. Alice couldn't see them, so there was no need in asking. No need to worry the others even more. An odd sound from the driveway caught my attention, and it took me about a fraction of a second to realize that it was Alice, growling out a stream of words that would have sounded horrifying in anything else than her crystal-clear, girlish voice.  
Moments later, she came flitting in the door, followed by Jasper and Rosalie, her usual lithe gait replaced by a jittery, neurotic step. Looking defeated, Alice handed Carlisle a small package, painstakingly wrapped in outdated, bone-colored paper. A tiny intake of air through my nose sent a cloyingly sweet smell into my useless lungs, a stench like moldy sugar and rotting apples. The only person who could have sent that package was Aro. Stunned by stress and fear, I just sat there, silent, as Carlisle ripped open the paper and emptied out a large crystal vial and two folded pieces of paper.  
He looked over one piece, an antique scarlet sheet with decorative gold trim, but for some reason threw it to the side while he unfolded the other.  
The only thing I could see on the red paper was a perfect circle with two jagged lines cutting through it, drawn like a simple work of art. Carlisle's eyes quickly flickered over the other sheet, off-white and decorated with black ink swirls on the back. His expression darkened over the three seconds it took him to read it. He wordlessly passed it to Esme, and by the time it reached me, the atmosphere in the room was downcast and miserable.  
The letter was written in Aro's delicate handwriting, and the dark red ink seemed to radiate a palpable smugness.

"Dear Cullen family,  
I apologize for our unfortunate encounter yesteryear.  
Naturally, we viewed the existence of your young Ms. Renesmee C. Cullen as a possible threat,  
and we were obliged by the trust of our beloved citizens to take action.  
I dearly hope that you understand our motives for this.  
We would like to continue the peace with your coven, make no mistakes,  
but there has been a resurgence of distrust among the inhabitants of our ancient city.  
We will regretfully need to take action, but we will avoid the use of unnecessary force if possible.  
Thus, we have been forced to resort to untraditional methods.  
Unfortunately, the suspicion extends to your allies of the Quileute tribe of La Push,  
and as such, even though we of the Volturi council have no will to embroil these shapeshifters,  
who we have seen to be both honorable, wise and peaceful, there is a long-standing grudge between our citizens in Volterra and the vicinity and creatures of this kind.

Please do not panic.  
We only do this to ensure the continued safety of humans and our comrades.  
If you wish to mitigate some effects of this sanction, then drink the contents of the attached vial once the sanction has taken effect.  
It does have a cost, but we have never assumed you to be vain and greedy.  
We hope our trust in you is not misplaced.  
Aro, Caius and Marcus of the Volturi Council.  
Overseen by Renata and Alec of the Volturi Guard."

Emmett began snarling a steady stream of words under his breath while pacing the length of the living room.  
"Damn it, they know perfectly well that we don't trust their crap. And if they're this formal, it can only mean they're out to kill us again, the bastards." Even as Jasper and Edward began joining in the strained conversation, their words were drowned out by a buzzing in my head.  
The Quileute. Quil. Embry. Sam. Seth. Leah. Emily. Billy. And most importantly, Jacob. What were they going to do to them? Emmett was right - Aro's syrupy, formal tone was a clear warning. Still, the part about the vial was clearly the most disturbing. Potions and occult trappings weren't their favored method of solving a conflict, and I knew from experience that Aro preferred to use his hand-picked soldiers for critical situations.  
Something drastic was needed to make the millennia-old Volturi deviate from their time-honored customs. With a bit of effort, I pushed my mental shield out from myself to convey the message to Edward. He seemed to have understood, because his expression hardened and he turned silent in the middle of his conversation. When he resumed it, it was clear that he thought the idea plausible, as he told the others in strained tones about my theory.


	6. Curse

A/N: Having a moving plot is one of the rarest things in my stories/fics. That may come from me originally being a slash writer. Oh yeah, I like reviews. Give them to me.

Chapter 6: Curse

The silence lasted for five minutes, the longest until now. After that, it was punctuated by Alice's periodic snarls and growls as she seemed to find more and more details about it. As Edward listened to her thoughts, his face seemed to turn even paler, and his face contorted into a frustrated grimace. When he spoke, his voice was flat and monotone.  
"Alice thinks it's something that will change us, change what we are. She can't see more than that. Aro has really covered up after himself this time."  
The last words came out in a sarcastic growl. He cocked his head an inch to the side, like he was intently listening to something. His eyes widened, and every bit of anger vanished from his face, replaced by pure desperation. "It's coming. No more than a couple of minutes." Only a matter of minutes? What about those who weren't prepared, such as the Quileute and... Nessie? What was going to happen to her? As far as I knew, she was still at Lily's. If something happened, she would be helpless.  
But should I run away from the others to find her, or should I betray my daughter to be with the rest of my family? The decision was too heavy, and I sat frozen on the couch, grinding my teeth. The strained silence was suddenly broken by Alice crying. No, trying to cry. She clenched her fists and squeezed her eyes shut to stifle the reflexive sobs, but she was still shaking from the effort. This time, Edward didn't need to speak for her as she struggled to choke out a few words.  
"Now. Get... ready. Don't be... afraid." Emmett just had time to growl under his breath before a wave of cold slammed into my chest and cut off my vision. I didn't feel like I was falling or floating - I was nowhere, and there was nothing to fall through or float in. A familiar thirst ripped through my throat, leaving behind a feeling of vulnerability and hollowness, like the spark of life that distanced me from my instincts was being ripped away.  
My body tensed, then relaxed, letting a sensation of raw power fill the hole in my soul. In a moment of stillness in the dark, I was free to think the feelings through. Something in me felt more human, not quite so unnatural and alien. A rising power was peaking behind the pain in my throat.  
The nothingness vanished. It was still dark, but I was somewhere again. I struggled to open my eyes, but nothing changed. Only after several minutes had passed did I realize that the darkness had faded, and I was clutching my head in my hands, eyes wide open. The first thing I noticed was that my heart wasn't beating. Somehow, it felt so much more absolute now, an emptiness in my chest that I couldn't ignore. I felt dead. Not just inhuman, like before, but truly dead.  
My hands were smooth and dry against my face, lacking the thin sweat of life. I had to concentrate on every breath, pulling so much useless air into my lungs. I could still sense Edward's familiar lilac-honey-and-sun scent and Alice's sharp, sterile hospital stench, and the faint sound of cars on the freeway was still reaching me.  
Theoretically, everything was normal. With me. But I had to check on the others. What if I had been lucky?  
I was the first to open my eyes. Nothing had happened. Not as far as I could see, at least. Everyone was sitting or standing where they had been before. But somehow, something felt off. Wrong. Alice slowly opened her eyes, and I saw my confusion and fear mirrored in them. Her eyes were still a golden yellow, but the wrongness was still there. Something about her had changed, but I couldn't seem to notice. She was just as dead as before - the word felt easier to think now, when I didn't feel so inhuman.  
Oh. That was it. Alice was still pale, faultless and perfectly beautiful as always, but the marble-like white of her skin had changed to a more human tone. She was still pale, and I felt no warmth, breathing or heartbeats from her or anyone else, but she wasn't as overtly monstrous as before.  
Something began to sting on my neck and arms, and Alice's eyes widened and her mouth fell open, like she knew what was happening. She darted forward, attempting to shove the others out of the room. When she had the others moved under the stairs, she ignored their confused questions and Emmett's swearing as they woke up, and stared at me with a mix of incredulousness and anger.  
"What are you doing?" she hissed at me. "Are you really that stupid? Get out of the room, now." When I sat still, uncomprehending, she threw herself across the room in a hurried movement, as if braving some painful danger, and slung me across her shoulder. She sprinted into the adjoining room, laying me in a dark corner by the stairs, and stared at me, confused. "Are you really as stupid as you seem?" she asked me, though her tone was more curious than patronizing. The only thing I could manage to stammer out was "What are you talking about, Alice? What's wrong?"  
Alice rolled her eyes, then pointed at my arm. "That's what's wrong, Bella." When I became conscious of what I saw, the stinging pain flooded back into my body. My arm was red and blistered, with blackish, charred marks on my shoulder. Emmett had woken up and was mumbling expletives through his teeth as he took in the burn that, judging from the pain, spread across my left arm, my neck, the left side of my face and my right shoulder.  
Alice began inspecting the wound, muttering sourly at me. "I can't believe that you didn't feel it, Bella. If I hadn't gotten you out of there, I guess you would've burned up. I can't be sure, though. Whatever Aro's done, it's huge. It's not just the sun, I can feel it. It's much more, too much."


	7. Damned

A/N: Whoo, I have a plot seed. I may be going too emo, but it's gonna get better.  
YES, THIS CHAPTER IS TOO SHORT.  
There's not really more to write on it. There's always the next chapter.  
During The Great Edit of December 2011, it really hit me how lazy this chapter was. I might try to expand it by a few sentences.

Chapter 7: Damned

I was vaguely aware of the others talking, Carlisle about the philosophical facets of this new "condition", as he called it, Rosalie about the implication that the liquid in the vial might somehow turn her mortal again, Emmett about creatively spun details of the rumored private lives of the Volturi and Edward's clipped replies, but it didn't reach all the way in.  
The sun. I always liked the day best. It made me feel that the world was a hopeful place at best, somewhere where you could find a measure of peace and happiness.  
I tried to remind myself that the sun would still be there, still lighting up the world and the souls of people. Humans. Those who could just live with a few petty worries. Those who could still see the sun without burning up.  
Somehow, the thought felt strangely fascinating, and I fought the urge to throw myself out in the sun, just to see it one last time. I became completely aware of what I was. I was dead, a corpse. I ought to be long buried. Yet I was still somehow alive. Even if I was beautiful, even if I could walk among humans, even if I could talk to them, all those things were unnatural. I should have been rotting in the ground for more than a year now.  
I could still hear the others talking, but I didn't want to resurface. With a kind of morbid curiosity, I decided to break out of my stupor. If I had to know how inhuman I was, I needed to look around. Look at others. Test myself to the limits. Maybe I could even learn how to feel alive again. Even if Aro's draught could cure me of this state, my curiosity would probably overpower the temptation to become human again. Detachedly, I watched Carlisle and Edward concernedly discuss the ethical and theological aspects of their new vulnerability to sunlight.  
Esme seemed to have given up on stopping the quite depressing topic and was instead watching from the sidelines with Rosalie and Alice. Jasper and Emmett were engaged in discussing their physical capabilities after the curse - it had to be a curse, had to be unnatural somehow - and managed to avoid any philosophical undertones.  
I caught myself cautiously analyzing them from my dazed state, like they would somehow reveal a hidden secret. Edward was just as blindingly handsome as before. His hair had changed color slightly; a human wouldn't be able to tell the difference at first sight, but it had shifted a tiny bit toward the reddish side of the spectrum. His skin, like that of all the others, had taken on a more human pallor, more gaunt than porcelain-perfect, and I was able to make out faint freckles on his cheeks and nose.  
Of course. He had reddish hair and had once had green eyes - it was hard to believe I hadn't figured out sooner that he'd once had freckles. Rosalie scarcely looked more human than earlier - her beauty and the way she carried herself, even when sitting still, were deeply inhuman even now, when her flawless skin hid a slight shadow of color, but that seemed to be part of her appeal.  
Jasper's scars had faded slightly, but his eyes seemed sunken and a feeling of disquiet hung around him, suggesting that something much worse was hiding under the picture perfect facade. Emmett was still positively huge, and while his broad smile had lost the disturbing predatory note it had once had, he seemed somehow more fundamentally disturbing, somehow _wrong,_ in almost imperceptible changes in both his speech and body carriage.  
So different. Some kind of new world. A dangerous world. But an exciting one. The weak light began stinging at the corners of my eyes and pricking at my skin like needles. Without thinking, I curled up in a corner, closed my eyes and fell into something like sleep for the first time in more than a year.


	8. World By Night

A/N: Gah. The plot is finally beginning.

Chapter 8: World by Night

When I woke up, the realization of what had happened yesterday didn't hurt as much as I'd expected. The darkness felt good, the night wind brushing across my skin like when I was human. Alive.  
For a year, I'd been convincing myself that feeling the wind blow around me, like I'd been some kind of statue, was a perk of that existence. Now, the night was ready for me. I still felt dead, just like yesterday, but it felt natural. My panic had been for nothing. There was a world out there, one I had never seen before. I could take it. Even though I'd never again feel warm, even though I'd never kiss my first innocent human boy with living lips, that really was part of the charm. This was going to be perfect.  
When I decided to open my eyes, the others were already up. I was already anticipating sleeping late like a human girl again.  
Emmett and Jasper seemed to be testing their strength against each other outside, and judging from their cheers, nothing had changed that much. Just that much better.  
The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Edward, standing in front of the mirror and looking uncharacteristically worried. He seemed younger, more vulnerable, with his mouth half-open and his wide eyes staring at the mirror in shocked disbelief. His hair had slipped a bit more towards red, and without the statue-like stillness of his body, I imagined that he must have looked this way when he was alive. Even his eyes seemed to have a shade of green amidst the golden yellow, an odd and fascinating contrast to his pale skin and hints of freckles.  
Ah. I was gawking at him again.  
What was making him look so worried? I stood up - a smooth movement without any similarity to my tired human mornings - and took a few experimental steps towards him, trying to meet his worried eyes. He seemed to notice me, but the comforting smile he was trying to send me quickly turned into a bitter grimace.  
"Bella?" The first time I'd really heard his voice since yesterday. Still like singing. Still beautiful. But that single word, my name, lacked the cutting intensity that I'd come to love about him. The regret flickering across his face, the more human appearance, his voice - it felt like I was talking to a different person. "How do I look?" What? Vanity wasn't typical of Edward. And then he really looked at me.  
Pain. Frustration. Regret. The kind of look a person would have if his worst nightmare had just come true, and he was trying to take it with pride. "Why are you asking? You look just as good as ever. What's wrong?" The worried response he'd be expecting. Of course I knew perfectly well what was wrong, but telling him would just be making matters worse.  
"You needed proof? I always told you that I didn't have a soul. And I took yours away. Look." I stepped closer to the mirror, only remembering mid-step that it would make him think I'd jumped to conclusions, but he didn't seem to care. Just like I'd guessed. Or almost. His reflection was pale and smeared, like it was a stain on the mirror and not a person. Not Edward.  
His face in the mirror was indistinguishable from his hair and from the background, and his whole reflection vanished and reappeared every few seconds. Beside me, he was staring at the blurred image in the mirror, clenching his fists and grinding his teeth. A person who wanted to cry, but couldn't.  
His body seemed to relax, though, lifted of all its problems, as he saw my clear reflection in the mirror. Was he really this happy because the dead girl beside him seemed to have a soul? Despite the morbid track of my thoughts, his reaction healed my mind of all my worries. Yes, I was completely unnatural. Yes, I was just that, a dead girl. But I had someone who loved me, a dead guy, beside me, and we were alive. A small giggle escaped me as I pounced on him and nuzzled my face against his neck. He was cold, but so was I.  
Something like that didn't matter when we were together. Edward seemed to have the same thought as me, because I could feel the muscles in his chin tightening into what could only be a smile.


	9. Beautiful Travesty

A/N: Dammit, that was a LONG time. I spent my time geeking out.  
Great December 2011 Edit: Holy inverted Anti-Jesus, what was I thinking? Way too short a chapter. But well, please bear with me here.

Chapter 9: Beautiful Travesty

I'd spent the whole last night staring out the window. Every star seemed new in some way, or maybe it was just my delusional mind. But I didn't care. Today was going to be a new start, and nothing was going to stop me. Not even Edward. No matter how much I loved him, this was a new life.  
Last night, Alice had been flitting around La Push, trying to find out what had happened to the werewolves. She'd been especially worried about Jake, but I didn't let that get to me. He needed someone to take care of him, and Alice could really need someone except me to worry about. From what I'd caught of her excited chattering when I'd only been half listening, I'd picked out a couple of things.  
The first point she'd gotten to was the disappearance of the "dog smell", which she'd seemed inordinately happy about. She'd also been saying something about the moon and half-forms, whatever she meant by that.  
Also, she'd sent Rose down to clean out her hate against them. She really was excited. Still, it didn't matter at all.  
Only one thing was on my mind now. It was seeing the world through new eyes. I'd seen Phoenix with a child's eyes and Forks through a teenager's eyes, and Volterra I'd only seen through a fear-tinted haze. It was time to look onto the world through the eyes of an adult and a predator.  
To be honest, I was worried about myself. It wasn't like me to get so swept up in something, especially not something adventurous like this. I'd always been a spectator, picking up shreds of other people's lives and disinterestedly sifting through them. Until I met Edward, worrying was the most engagement I'd ever had in another person's life. But now, all worry I had about changing was wiped away by the opportunity of a new beginning.  
I realized I was smiling, a wide, instinctual smile that bared my teeth in a predator's grimace. That was right. Nothing could wait. I dragged the improvised blackout-paper trash bags from the windows, opening the door and stepping from the old, disused room I'd been sleeping in onto the balcony.  
I dusted off my clothes, dragging the fresh night air into my lungs, together with the faint smell of the city on the wind. Grabbing onto the railing, I deftly flipped myself into the air and landed on the other side of the river, my body surging with adrenaline.  
Perfect. That was what I wanted to step into the new world with. I leapt up, grabbed a branch and flung myself to the next tree. As the outline of the cottage I shared with Edward slowly appeared through the evening mist, I pushed up towards the branch I was holding, brutally tearing through the trees down onto the ground.  
Not wanting guilt to creep up on me, I quickly opened the door, ran into the bedroom, grabbed an expensive leather suitcase Alice had bought for me earlier and rummaged through the huge closet, searching for some passable clothes. With a bit of effort, I managed to find a reasonably relaxed getup consisting of a pair of navy jeans, a brown t-shirt, a loose black jacket and a pair of brown leather shoes.  
All expensive, but perfectly casual, and most importantly, not suspicious. I put them on, stuffed the dress and heels I'd had on and some quite random clothes of a quite formal nature into the suitcase, grabbed my wallet from the night table and ran out of the cottage before Edward's scent could get to me.


	10. Hubris

A/N: Christ, the last chapters have been way too short. I'll try to work each chapter through a bit more

from now.

Chapter 10: Hubris

It felt like flying.

Crashing through the world that I was master of. It wasn't hard to catch my own reflection in the lakes I sprinted by in my adrenaline-fueled insanity on the way to the city. Seattle. The real world.

I'd expected more of myself than the skinny, pale girl in unassuming clothing until I saw the look on my face. There wasn't really any word to describe the emotion in my eyes, at least not one I knew. A lust for power, happiness, relief - none of them really fit me. The yellow glare of my eyes and my predatory smile contrasted with the girly face I saw in the lake, in such a sick way I had to laugh. The ringing bell sound had vanished from my laugh, leaving only something infinitely more human, but chilling in its own way. A girl's laugh, tinged by the possession of power far beyond what she should even know of.

I could have spent hours observing myself, my every single incongruity and surreal detail. But I had no time. Every single moment could have been wasted by the time I reached Seattle.

As the steel-grey silhouette of the city grew closer, I slowed down and tried to get a hold on my mind. I had to seem normal. The thought of a potential reaction hadn't reached me until now.

What would people do if they knew one of the actual living dead was among them?

Would they hesitate with the stakes and shotguns just because the abomination had the body and voice of a beautiful girl, her lips spread in a serene smile even as her face was covered in blood? Blood. I hadn't thought of it until now. I froze halfway through a step.

Would I have to risk other people's lives just to survive? Maybe I shouldn't go. Maybe I could feed off animals the way I'd done in the past? Even as the thought went through my head, I realized the impossibility of the idea. Just the thought of blood had always tempted me, even with the bland taste of animal blood. I'd often tried to keep my hunger for the blood of animals so I'd never have to feed off a human, but now, the hunger had narrowed down.

Even the idea of animal blood, bland and flavorless except for the sickly tinge of salt and the warm, living feeling that reminded me of the life I'd stolen, created a dull, acidic ache of disgust in the back of my throat. I'd have to throw away a bit of my compassion for people I didn't know and wouldn't ever see again. The perfect feeling of happiness and fulfillment that had nested in my mind for a while had become marred by regret and a sense of helplessness.

But giving up now would just make everything worthless. If I let such feelings control me, I'd have let Aro's curse get to me. My hate against Aro, the filthy, conspiring monster that had landed me and my new family in this, let me amass the willpower to go forward again.

I wouldn't let that worm succeed. The hateful thoughts in my mind made me hesitate, but still, I put my foot to the ground again and kept walking.

Coming into Seattle felt just as relieving as I'd imagined. It was a living place, even at night.

As I walked through the grey early-autumn streets, keeping my hands in my pockets and looking downwards to hide my eyes, the few glances I managed to cast at the buildings told me that most of the buildings still pulsed with life during the night. Even though some places radiated body heat and loud music, some places

betrayed the calm the city seemed to try to hide. A few friends in a cramped studio apartment sharing a six-pack of beer, a young man and his girlfriend intertwined in a hotel room, leaning against the wall - all these dreamlike snapshots slowly made me smile again.

This place at night was exactly how I'd expected it. Even though the city was cold and grey, composed of concrete apartments, gaudily decorated storefronts and huge, soulless houses with windows that allowed every passersby to watch the family's daily charade of perfect prosperity, looking beyond the buildings showed something I'd never seen before.

People in a desolate city, making the best out of their lives in the warm corners they managed to carve out for themselves, even though the darkness was bound to get into their world someday.

As I checked into a cheap hotel for the day, smiling in a way that made the clerk feel smugly satisfied, I began to feel something akin to jealousy for the masses.


	11. Boundary

A/N: Well. At least the plot moves.  
Great Edit of December 2011: Christ on a crutch, this was a big low. Short chapters crammed with half-hearted faux-philosophizing and an impenetrable wall of emo slowly moving forward, crushing everything in its way.

Chapter 11: Boundary

I guess I'd chosen a good hotel.  
I'd expected a question the first time I came out just after sunset, but sending the clerk a sweet smile seemed to eliminate that worry. As I stepped out the door, pulling the hood over my head and brushing my hair in front of my eyes, I simply began drifting through the streets, taking in the slow pace of the people living on the outskirts of the city.  
Still, after an hour, the loneliness began getting to me. Even though my glimpses into the apartments showed warmth and a stubborn humanity, it seemed to be so because the inhabitants were striving against the outside. Though the cold didn't hurt me, I could still feel it stinging my skin as the wind ripped down the grey streets, bringing an icy rain with it.  
The concrete walls hedging in the dirty streets were clammy with rain, soaking in behind the peeling sheets of paint, which came off every time I leaned against a wall to think about where I was actually going.  
The people I shared the streets with wore heavy clothes, leaning forward against the wind and rain. Every so often, I saw their faces when they passed under a streetlight - somehow tenacious, even in the face of the weather and the silhouettes of others above them, reasonably safe in their homes while others were forced to stay out in the darkness. Even though my clothes and hair were soaked, I kept on walking down the streets, towards the center of the city itself.  
I had nothing else I could do - the scenes in the apartments belonged to people I'd never know and never see again. Slowly, the rain began letting up, leaving only the wind howling between the buildings, pushing at my back as I made my way past the outskirts of the city with their peeling paint and rain-scoured bricks and down to a place that was so much more alive than I'd expected of a cloudy Northern city on a dismal autumn night.  
I'd never been so grateful for such a place. The street I'd walked onto was a mess of bright storefronts, bar windows bathed in red and blue neon and people walking past the blinding show of light. Everything pulsed with life. I felt like I could see into the life of every person I passed, their faces showing evidence of a whole life lived through good and bad times, the looks on their faces and the expressions they wore reading like a story of friends, failed relationships, marriages and the days that shaped their personalities for the rest of their lives.  
Maybe, just maybe, the life I'd had before was even greyer than this place. Even though I couldn't participate in these lives anymore, two years ago I just saw every life passing me every day as another stranger. But still, it felt strangely sickening to watch the lives of other people, hiding at night below a hood, looking down into the ground.  
I pulled my hood back, brushed my hair from my eyes, ran my fingers a few times through the strands that had been out in the rain and began walking, taking in every single bright flash of light from behind a window, every single emotion behind the silence of the people who were trudging beside me, gritting their teeth against the wind.  
No matter how sure it was that the future would see my world in ruins, I'd enjoy every single second of the bittersweet enjoyment I could find. As a reminder of my situation, I could feel the bone-dry thirst grating in the back of my throat again, but I just smiled through the pain and looked straight forward, not casting my gaze down a single time to avoid the eyes of a stranger.  
I'd been cowering in the shadows for too long, no matter what I'd been trying to tell myself with my false confidence. I'd still been hiding, afraid of myself. This was going to be the moment when everything would change. I wasn't going to let this opportunity by.  
Most importantly, if I gave up, Aro was going to win. No matter what I had to do, no matter how much of myself I'd have to let go of, I wouldn't betray my family. I'd come back to them when I was sure I wouldn't lose, but if we were all gathered in the same place, Aro would clearly strike. Until then, I wouldn't be afraid.


	12. Eulogy

A/N: Do not worry, little lost lambs. I'm still writing.  
Great Edit of December 2011: I realized I might have presented goths in the wrong light – I forgot to really rub in how much the guy wasn't really a goth. I don't want to piss off people who may be my main readers. Now you know – and knowing is half the battle.

Chapter 12: Eulogy

Something came over me. Whatever I'd have felt if I wasn't drunk on my own power, I was blind to now.

But still, I understood myself. I wouldn't become afraid of my power. I'd just resolved I wouldn't cower. I almost couldn't fathom it. I had power far beyond anything in the human world, and this time I was free to use it. If Aro's plan was to scare us into submission, he wouldn't use force. The Aro I knew was too intelligent to ruin a well-planned trap.  
But no matter how excited I was, I couldn't just vault into my new world without a thought. If I drew too much attention to myself, maybe even my family would be forced to turn against me, and internal fighting was the last thing we needed. I walked along the street for a while, looking for a place to rest and get my mind together. I decided on an overgrown park slightly off the main streets, seating myself on a weathered stone bench amidst a thorny mess of bushes and trees.  
First, the time. I had to face that if I didn't get inside behind walls or blackout curtains before dawn, I'd quite simply burn up. It had been about one and a half hours since I'd went out the door, which I was pretty sure had been at about nine in the evening. That meant it was about half past ten now. Plenty of time, and just in time for the nightlife. That'd probably be my life from now.  
Even though the pun was pretty lame, it had some truth in it and lent a bit of realism to the situation. I'd never really been to a nightclub before, seeing as I hadn't ever gotten old enough. Still, it was a good place to ...feed. I knew that was the common word, but it still felt a tad too inhuman, like humans were just food. I knew better. I'd been alive until about a year ago, and even though I knew I was more than just a dead girl walking around, it didn't do much to help the burning thirst in my throat. Thinking about it only made it worse, as always.  
I lurched to my feet in a movement I knew didn't look human at all, determined to sate the beast in me before it took over. First, I needed not to look out of place. A small thing, but I had a feeling it would come in handy if I didn't want to attack anyone for sustenance.  
I didn't have the self-control to walk past hordes of people to find a place I'd fit perfectly in, so I just cast a quick glance over the nearest place a hundred feet or so down the street from the park. A lot of people in black clothes, standing in groups in the alley outside the club, smoking and talking. There wasn't really time to fix the clothes, so I just decided to buy some cigarettes. To me, things that worked through the human organism were the clearest signs of life.  
I held my breath as I walked through the crowd to get to a kiosk on the other side, where I grabbed a lighter and the first pack I saw and gave the cashier the money, a far less thrilling experience than I'd expected as a rebellious teenager.  
When I got outside, I opened the pack, let a smoke dangle in the corner of my mouth and lit up, filling my mouth with a choking, thick taste I'd known from the time five years or so ago, when my dad was still smoking. I purposely caught my reflection in a puddle and smiled when I saw how well the clothes and cigarette let me play the role of bad girl. I walked a bit into the alley, where I couldn't be seen from the street, leaned up against the wall beside the club's back entrance and laughed inwardly when a man came over to me in a matter of seconds.  
He was quite pale, with long, back-combed black hair and clothes with quite a surplus of buckles. His watery blue eyes peered unblinkingly at me from above his wide grin, and as he came closer, I realized he was probably just looking for someone who'd sleep with him despite his greasy, sallow complexion and unsettling demeanor. There really wasn't a hint of honesty about him, and I wondered inwardly how he could even think I'd believe him.  
"So, are ya new to the scene, or what?" His small, pearly eyes were still firmly fixed on my face, only rarely blinking. "Nah. I don't really know what scene this is, to be honest. I only just came to town." Talking in such a relaxed way seemed to make him even more excited. Just the better, as that meant I could avoid attacking him.  
"The goth scene, o' course. The night scene. You one o' us, or jus' wanna be one?"  
Regardless of what scene it was, he was clearly a worse example. That meant I wouldn't be as ashamed.  
"Yeah... I was kinda lookin' for excitement. Somethin' new, ya know? Jus' got outta my smalltown."  
His smug, fast-talking language was easy to imitate, so I decided to practice when I had the opportunity. "I can give ya excitement, baby. Jus' follow me, I know a good spot for th' fast life."  
His smile betrayed his intentions, but I decided to act my part and play with him. "Thank ya. So where is it?"  
There. I had him. "Jus' over here, dahlin'. It's a club jus' around th' corner." I followed him around the corner of the rain-drenched alley, waiting to strike when we got a bit out of sight. But just when we got around the corner, he shoved me up against the wall. Unprepared as I was, I couldn't resist, and adrenaline welled up in me together with wild anger, like a cornered animal.  
"Don't." The word came out of my mouth in a feral snarl I couldn't even recognize, and for a moment I saw his eyes widen. Then the sneer came back on his face, and my instincts flared up again, out of control. I'd meant to push him away and make a run for it, but I wasn't used to my strength.  
My loosely clenched fist went through his chest with a crunching sound, so fast that I thankfully couldn't feel his ribs giving in. Just for a moment, his mouth opened in shock, and then I sunk my teeth into his neck just to avoid seeing his eyes.  
Pleasure flowed through me as I drank in what was left of him, but as I stood there afterwards, with blood on my arm and face and the corpse of my would-be rapist at my feet, I was struck by the realization that I'd kind of enjoyed it all.


	13. Humanity

A/N: Something. I have a nervous habit of smacking an A/N on every chapter. Don't mind me.

Chapter 13: Humanity

I just stood there, staring. I still wasn't really able to comprehend what had just happened. I'd acted out of instinct, hadn't meant to kill him - but he was dead, and I didn't even feel sick. Did he deserve it? No. No way. He'd wanted to rape me, but that didn't mean I had the right to kill him. Or did it? The Volturi were holding back, so there was no authority to keep me in check. Theoretically, I could and would do whatever I wanted.

In reality, the situation was different. First, I would be distancing myself from the others. Second, every murder would take its toll on me. Now, when I concentrated on it, I felt guilty, but still not enough. After ten, hundred or thousand, I probably wouldn't even care, or I'd just find it fun. The desire to just give in and stop worrying crossed my mind for a second, but I wasn't depraved enough yet to listen.

I was stalling. If I didn't hurry, someone would find me. My hoodie was black, so I could make it to a laundromat or such without getting spotted. That left my face. Licking it from my lips sent another spike of fear through me - would this get normal? - but I managed to get it off my lips and wipe the rest of my face off with my clean sleeve. Trying desperately not to puke up the blood I'd just paid some of myself for, I managed to pick up the man's body and stuff it in a trashcan. Then, with a twinge of fear, I remembered that it wasn't that easy.

Charlie'd had two homicide cases back in the day, before he flat-out refused to take on more, and from that I'd learned some nightmarish childhood lessons after I read his notes when he'd gone to sleep. Dental imprints could be used to identify a corpse, as could fingerprints, if they were on record. Of course, someone would clearly know the subject too, so the face could give me problems, too. Grinding my teeth and half-closing my eyes, I lifted the man's bloodless body out of the trashcan and smashed his jaw with a quick punch before smashing it against the wall with all the force I could muster. Then, my stomach heaving and churning, I dragged his hands hard across the pavement, ruining the fingerprints.

Dumping the body back into the trashcan and wiping the blood and bone off on the inside of my hoodie, I hurried out of the alley. I vaguely felt someone's eyes on me as I went down the street to find a late-night laundromat, but I was too shaken to give it much thought.

Sitting there on the filthy bench in the nearest place I could find, wearing only a baggy brown t-shirt and a pair of already dirty jeans, fitting in perfectly by just staring at the floor, it all felt like a dream. I'd killed a man in cold blood, then coolly cleaned up the scene by destroying the means of identification, only struggled a bit with myself, and then just went over to wash my bloodied clothes. It had been self-defense in some way, of course, but it had still been utterly monstrous.

No, it hadn't. It'd just been inhuman. There was still such a long way to go to become an immortal monster like the Volturi were. As long as I didn't stoop to their level, I could keep on doing whatever it took to stop being afraid of myself. Then I could rejoin my family. I was sure they were alive. They probably knew I was alive, or they'd be searching for me. As I couldn't sense any of them, and no one had chased after me when I left, they'd probably figured out that I'd wanted to be alone. I was broken out of my thoughts by something tugging on my shirt hem.

Looking up, I saw that it was a boy of about seven, holding the hand of a slightly younger girl, probably his sister. "Wanna play, missy? We're booooooored." He grinned widely, and then made a grotesque grimace, as if to express his boredom. "No thanks. I'm busy." I managed to appear less cold by squeezing in a forced smile along with the dismissal. "Oh." The boy looked disappointed, but turned around and left with his little sister trailing after him. Wasn't he scared? He'd just seen my eyes, hadn't he? I'd studied warning colors in Biology back in Forks, and such a small kid would quite definitely be scared by someone with red or yellow eyes. That meant they had to be back to normal, but the fact didn't interest me at all. So many things had happened since Aro's curse that some small thing like this wasn't surprising at all. It was probably because I'd fed recently.

So that was what he was doing. I understood now. I had nearly fallen into his trap, although I'd resolved not to fall to his level. Needing blood just to look human? Fine then, I'd do that. It was probably just meant as a scare or reverse psychology, though. Carlisle or Edward would have fallen in easily as a result of their strong pacifist beliefs, so it wasn't a far stretch that I would. He was trying to disarm us and catch us off guard by scaring us into starving. No way in hell was I going to give in to him. I'd keep on fighting, even though it meant figuring out his plans at every turn.

Back at the hotel, I was spread out in the small bed, with the wall mirror pushed up close so I could study my own face. My eyes were brown again, like they'd been before, just with more of some kind of gleam to them. I smiled as I realized it made me look outright alluring, even though I looked downright thuggish with my black hoodie and hair down in my face, chain-smoking out of fear that someone might be watching me after the murder. A human wouldn't just stare into the mirror for hours without moving, but would do something, even if it was just smoking. Then again, a human wouldn't wear heavy clothes in a heated room. I hadn't really noticed until now, as there was no body heat to make me uncomfortable. But I really didn't care.

As dawn kept closer, I locked myself in the bathroom to avoid the sun and spent the hours leading up to sunrise thinking about normal things. Things a twenty-year-old young woman should be thinking of. Friends, like Angela, Jessica and even Alice. Family, like Rosalie, Renesmee and Carlisle. People I loved, like Edward and Jacob. Everything, everything but worrying about if anyone found the man you'd killed and stuffed into a trashcan after cleaning up the identifying marks like some kind of serial killer.


	14. Bonds

A/N: This has gone from a spur-of-the-moment crack-fic idea to a thing that's completely out of control.

Chapter 14: Bonds

I woke up on the damp bathroom floor, still in my clothes and sitting just as I'd had when I fell asleep. The first feeling I got was one of confused recollection, quickly replaced by a hollow sensation in my stomach as I remembered what I'd done the night before.

I wouldn't think about it. Just remembering hurt like someone was digging his fingers into my chest, but something more was hiding underneath. It took me a moment to realize what it was - could I really be lonely? I hadn't talked to anyone in two days, except the man who I... no. I hadn't really spoken to anyone in those two days, not really felt like I was the same at some level.

Even the connection I'd felt with the people on the streets now seemed to have been fueled more by a feeling of superiority than actual empathy. I could feel it wearing on me, the feeling of complete detachment from anyone in the city. They were all human. No one else existed here I could share anything with. But I had to try.

If I continued to cultivate my removal from other people's lives, killing people would only get easier. If I felt detached from them, like I didn't share any basal emotions or needs with them, they wouldn't feel like living beings when I killed them. I'd refused to look at the man's body, but I'd punched him right through the chest. A morbid slideshow of pictures ran through my head when I dared to think about things like that - people everywhere, in bars, on the streets, in their own homes, and I knew I'd end up killing them all if I removed myself from their existence

Some of the images burned into my mind; a girl about my own age, her limbs at grotesque angles and her neck broken, letting her head roll backwards like some kind of broken doll; a small child, like the boy I'd met yesterday, lying on the ground, and the only thing I knew was that he was dead; and the image of the man from yesterday, his face flashing in my mind like a warning light, accompanied by a feeling of painfully strong dread.

I'd need to find someone, and I didn't have time to think at all. Slamming the door open, I ran down the hallway and out through the lobby, not even pausing to look at the clerk at all. I reflexively followed the path I'd taken yesterday, far clearer in my memory than I'd ever wanted it to be. I stopped to think at the exact same park bench I'd sat on yesterday, the feeling of déja vu only quenched by the differences in my knowledge between yesterday and now. Before, I'd been sure I could just take it all, now when I'd figured everything out; now, I was still numbed at what had happened to shatter that hope, and I knew that I hadn't known enough.

I just had to get up, find something or someone to reconnect me to humanity and act on it, without completely destroying it all again. I decided to enter the nightclub I'd been outside yesterday - there was no point in pulling myself even further away from what had happened than necessary. The bouncer was a joke - he didn't stop to look closer at me or even ask for money or an ID after just one smile. The club's interior was almost solid black, with none of the Halloween-like gimmicks that popular culture had had me imagining.

Quite a lot of people were sitting in the burgundy leather bar chairs or in the black couches in the adjoining, smaller room, but most people were on the dancefloor, a slow-moving, pulsating mass of humans that emitted a warmth that almost made me gag to suppress the burning in my throat. The bar was too close to the dancefloor to be safe at all, and the bartender was probably looking for suspicious behavior.

Had I already started thinking this way, surveying a hunting ground before striking? I wasn't even hungry... no, I just didn't need blood. I'd always be hungry, and I'd have to reconcile myself with that. I didn't need anything more to hinder my existence. Walking into the adjoining room, I carefully sat down in one of the couches, not too far nor too close from the group of girls about my age or so chatting on the far side of the room, about three of them looking nervous and out-of-place in their black clothes and thick makeup - obviously newcomers.

The girl the furthest away from me was about thirteen feet away, easy to reach in a casual leap. No. I definitely hadn't thought this way before. Now, it just came as a reflex. Too far, too hard to reach. Too close, they get suspicious. Those two sentences seemed to be embedded in my subconscious. I really was a predator now.

And maybe, just maybe, I could get one more predator by my side tonight.

It felt drastic, but I was incapable of pinpointing just why I was having qualms about it. I smiled a bit, not even scared by the situation and that I was probably about to damn someone to the same hunger as me, and got ready to act normal.


	15. Mirror

A/N: As you can see, I habitually start writing with typing out an A/N for no reason whatsoever.

Chapter 15: Mirror

The excitement began when the girls started mentioning me in their conversation, whispering remarks they thought I couldn't hear. They weren't suspicious, only curious of who I was and why I was here alone.

I started distractedly rooting through my wallet - I had to remember that humans didn't just sit there without even blinking. License, cash, credit card, passport, fake license, fake passport. I'd never needed those two yet - I'd gotten them as preparation from J. Jenks about half a year ago, just to make sure I had them. On the documents, my name was written as Melissa Simons, a citizen of Alaska and twenty-one years old. Convincing and quite nicely made, as expected from J.

My mind was ripped away from the faint self-satisfaction I felt by a sudden shift in the tone of the conversation beside me. Still looking through my spare-change pocket, I made sure to catch every single word. "Now that you say it, she really looks lonely." "Should we just talk to her? I know she's a total stranger, but it's really pretty cold to just let her sit alone like that."

Exactly what I'd been waiting for. "Yeah, let's. It's too boring in here anyway, and out there everyone's a drunk goth." Perfect. One of the girls stood up and sat down beside me, the others hesitantly trailing after her. She was a bit older than me - in her mid-twenties or such - and was wearing a slim black lace dress so detailed that I was for once thankful for Alice's simpler tastes in fashion.

Seemingly struggling to hit the right balance between casual and formal, she moved a tiny bit away from me before talking. "What're you doing here? Are you new or something?" Her tone was slightly rough, but her voice was quite concerned. No ulterior motives. Not like him. "Yeah, I just came here. I'm stayin' up at some motel outta downtown." I was getting ever so slightly better at relaxed speech - it didn't come out as forced anymore. "Then why're you at a club like this? You haven't got anyone with you, and you don't look like you're the kind to come in places like this." She was getting ever-so-slightly suspicious.

Maybe it was my cookie-cutter explanation, even though I was telling the truth. Maybe something more personal would work. "Eh, I haven't got any friends around here. I guessed I could maybe make some." It seemed to work. The slight tightening of the muscles around her eyes and lips vanished, and I had to suppress a smirk. Was it really that easy?

"Just come join in. We're not picky", she said with a smile. "You'll probably get a bit of base here in town, and that's what you need." She beckoned for the other girls to sit down, but they still seemed apprehensive, even though they obligingly settled down on the couch. Even though they were now right next to me, one of them clearly kept her distance, and the other three, the ones I'd singled out as being newcomers to the scene, were clearly trying to overcome their instincts just to get close to me. The predator's aura wasn't gone. The atmosphere in the room was tense, like everyone was ready to fight or run at a moment's notice.

When I actually gave my name - as Melissa, just to avoid unnecessary risks - the tension eased. Now, they could put a name on me, be sure I really was someone. Knowing my name seemed to grant them a measure of confidence, and one of the newcomer girls began throwing questions at me. "Heeeeeey, Melissa" - she said the false name with a sort of smugness, like she'd finally got me - "where'd you come from? You're not a city girl, I can tell." As their mood relaxed, mine became more strained. If every one of them was all over me, I'd never be able to get one alone.

Wait. That had never been my goal. I'd come here to talk, not to draw others into my situation. Maybe just finding my family would be - no. Not if it would fulfill Aro's plan. Still, I decided to keep talking to loosen up the mood.

"I'm from Juneau. And I thought it was a big city. I mean, it's a village to this place. Seattle's huge." She leaned even closer in, the smug grin replaced by a more friendly expression. The others were chatting among themselves, seemingly relieved that someone had taken over the conversation for them. "Sooooo, whaddaya think about the place until now? Like it?" Speaking the truth here couldn't hurt. "It's kinda dreary, y'know? I lived just outside the city, so it was a bit open, but here, it's just buildings." She seemed surprised at first, maybe even hurt, but it was quickly replaced by what I'd deduced to be her usual behavior - a rapid-fire barrage of loosely related questions.

"You think it's creepy? You ain't seen nothin'. This place's got some real bad districts. Wanna see the older quarter? There's an asylum there, y'know, right outta some horror movie. Whaddaya say?" She seemed oddly carefree and optimistic about something like this, and I realized that she actually made me slightly nervous. Still, obliging couldn't hurt.

"Sure. Everyone, or just us?" "Everyone. Hey, let's go! Alaska girl here wants to see the old nuthouse. Who needs these drunk Poe-reading wannabe poets?" She followed this up with a rather insulting and completely tasteless remark about the people out by the bar. She obviously didn't care for the club visit at all, and she was riled up and quite frankly really annoying, but maybe having friends could also feel this way. It would probably lie in ruins by tomorrow, but I could as well get as much out of this fleeting friendship as I could.


	16. Shards

A/N: Dunno why I even write these. Nervous tic, probably.

Chapter 16: Shards

I couldn't help smiling and laughing with the girls as we walked out towards the less densely populated part of town. The chatty girl, who'd given her name as Jenna, was all over me verbally, asking me questions about a past I was making up on the spot. To her, I was a girl who'd grown up in Juneau with an older brother, spent a bit of time at odd jobs and had taken out to see the big city before getting a permanent spot at a local mechanic's workshop.

She was rather more reluctant to part with information, and the furthest back I could get was two hours, where she'd evidently started the party. She'd gotten bored of the venue she'd been at after an hour, and decided to trawl for another party with her friends. She had black hair, though it was probably dyed for the night, and bright blue eyes that matched her smile in intensity. Maybe I'd take her? Even if I did, she probably wouldn't mind it, but I couldn't do it here, even if I'd known how to.

One of the girls who hadn't said a word to me yet was glaring at me, furrowing her brows at every smile with which I answered Jenna's shallow ranting. Even as we approached our goal, a huge building with only a few lights in the windows, at the end of a road lined by concrete apartments and a few trees planted with the purpose of lighting up the dismal mood, I could feel her eyes at my back.

Along the road, Jenna, who'd given up on getting any more information out of me, walked over to the main group, leaving me to walk alone for a minute or so before the suspicious girl began walking slower, gradually approaching me. When she'd reached me, she moved closer in, about a foot from me, and began talking quietly into my ear. "Listen, bitch, I dunno what you're tryin' to do with my friends, but you're easy to spot. If you're gonna mug us or somethin' just because you think we don't expect it, give up, okay?"

Shit. This was bad. It came before I'd predicted. "Eh? Calm down, I'm not even stupid enough to do that. I don't have a cell, and you led me out here. I can't call for backup, and you're five. What makes you think I'll mug you?" I gave the already sharp words a slightly poisonous tone, like a normal person would if she'd just been accused of wanting to rob the friends she'd just made. "It's the way you walk... no, the way you are. You're out for something, and I can tell it."

She was steadily raising her voice, and the other girls were coming over, staring at us as if they were eagerly awaiting a public execution. Only Jenna looked worried. "Even if you've got a gun or somethin', give up. I'm not stupid. I'm prepared, and I can beat your ass anyway. Really, I can see that you can't even defend yourself without a weapon. It's in the way you look around."

The curiosity in the other girls' eyes had turned to horror. From what she said, she was probably armed. The question wasn't to survive, but to avoid killing anyone again. "I - I wasn't... I couldn't even think that way. Just don't do anything." Even though I'd just wanted to feign nervosity, a challenging note had crept into my tone. She seemed to bite upon that nuance, letting it fuel her paranoia - which, I had to admit, wasn't baseless. I wasn't being framed, I was being found out. "Stop being cocky, you cheap mugger whore. Wanna fucking die?" Her voice had escalated into a panicked shriek that betrayed her fear. She was afraid of killing me, but seemed to feel it was necessary to protect her friends. Playing on that would maybe scare her to let off me.

"Then go ahead. Kill me if you want, but I never wanted to do anything to you." Even as I said the words, I realized my error. The sentence might have won her over if I'd been aggressive from the start, but the snap was painfully clear. It sounded more like a confession of guilt than a challenge. Frustration welled up inside me, making my whole body feel like it was burning. She'd ignored my explanations twice and was now threatening me. I wasn't letting her go with this, not on my honor as a person or as a predator.

All the other girls had drawn back, but seemed reluctant to call the police on their friend. "Okay. So you finally admit it, do ya? You're hoping I don't hurt ya," she hissed, shaking slightly from the adrenaline. "I'm stronger than you, bitch, and I'm gonna prove it. Die already, goddammit!" As she stepped forward, I decided not to dodge too early. If she panicked, I might be forced to defend myself.

She lunged towards me with her left side first, rummaging in her coat with her right hand. She'd extended two fingers on her left hand. Dammit. Going directly for the eyes. She was trained. I'd seen Charlie do that once, when I'd snuck after him on an assignment to take care of a bar brawl. He'd been furious. But this girl wasn't old enough to be in the police. That meant no extra legal protection, no possible backup and no special treatment from the cops, so I decided to fight back. I choosed to fall backwards, easily breaking the fall with my left hand and sweeping her legs out from under her with a low kick. A reckless maneuver, but I was stronger than her, so I didn't have to be careful about such details. I used my right hand to flip myself upwards, expecting her to submit.

She got to her feet, an apologetic, scared expression on her face. I'd taught her a quick lesson. I was stronger and faster than her, and that -

Two loud bangs, a noise I'd only heard in movies.

A stabbing pain in my chest. The girl was standing with her right arm stretched out in front of her, looking as if she was shocked at the power of the gun she was holding in her hand. Eyes wide open, mouth twisted in a snarl, holding her gun as far in front of her as she could. The instant her look changed to something half disappointed, half expectant - I hadn't shown any signs of injury yet - my instincts took over, painting a red haze in front of my eyes and spitting fiery words through my mind.

Kill her. Don't hesitate. It's your life.

I was all too happy to oblige.

As I brought my leg up as high as I could, I saw the terror in her eyes, and as I brought it down, I saw for the first time the look a person has in their eyes when they know they're going to die. This time, I didn't avert my eyes, and I saw as my heel ripped through her collarbone. I saw as I smashed her ribcage, and I saw as I tore my leg through her body, smashing her pelvis even with just the residual force. It had happened again. I couldn't even look at the others, and I realized again that this was always going to happen before I got a hold on myself.

Now it was just the question of how to move on from here.


	17. Fate

A/N: Gyaah. I don't know what this thing is becoming, but if you think it's more My Immortal or "Draco In Leather Pants" than an epic, legendarily epic legend, do tell me.

...this thing's hit 17 chapters? Sorry for the bad chapter.

Chapter 17: Fate

Again. Why? Was it me or the curse?

I still couldn't meet their eyes. One girl was crying, and another was trying to comfort her, clearly on the verge of tears herself. There wasn't anything I could do to make up for such a thing. The only thing left for me was a confession, an apology.

I turned my head and looked Jenna straight in the eye. She wasn't crying.

She was smiling. Had I finally found someone like... no. Jenna wasn't the one I needed to apologize to. Even though her reaction was unfathomable, I had to apologize to the others. But no matter what I tried to do, no matter what I thought to reinforce my beliefs, I couldn't break through my own shame. It wasn't something I could just fix by saying sorry. The only thing I needed was to get them away. To avoid seeing the others' eyes. To avoid the guilt I'd brought upon myself just by being myself.

"Go. Just go. I'm sorry." The last two words came out slurred, as my chest heaved in reflexive jerks that brought no tears. Footsteps, interrupted at times by mumbling I tried not to hear.

"Just follow me, okay? It's happened, and we can't help her." A sob and the noise of fabric against fabric. "Did you see that? Don't tell me you didn't see. She shot her. She fucking shot her! She's not normal, okay? I just don't know what I should do." The ambiguity of the words cut even deeper than the feelings behind them. Was it me or the girl who shot me? Did she even look like the villain in a situation like this?

I stared into the cracked pavement until I couldn't hear the footsteps anymore. Only one noise remained. Excited, deep breathing. Jenna. She laid a hand on my shoulder and gently pushed my chin up with the other, forcing me to meet her eyes. The blue of her eyes seemed electric with adrenaline, and her voice, as painfully clear as the images in my mind, told me some words I never could've imagined she would ever say. "That was one hell of a show, Alaska girl! Way to make this night fun. Mind tellin' me how ya did it?"

What? She'd just seen me kill one of her friends, and she was talking to me as if I'd just shown her Paradise. "I'll tell you if you tell me why you're so happy." I made no effort to disguise the venom in my words. I poured all my anger, all my frustration, all my senseless rage into those words, spitting them out in a hiss I'd never known I could make. Her inane response just caused the sickness in my stomach to flare up again. "Yeah, my pa never let me out after school. I got home, and I had to stay there for the rest of the day. I guess he was afraid someone would rape me or somethin'. So watchin' you pull that off was awesome." I could care less about her past. What I wanted to know was how she dared to treat murder in such a way in front of me.

"You're not even angry? I just kicked your friend in half. She's goddamn lying right there. Are you sick or something?" The situation was surreal. Seeing Jenna smiling and chattering exitedly about the murder of a friend - I just couldn't deal with it. I had no idea how to solve this problem, and she dared to talk about it like it was just some show? "Nah, she wasn't really my friend. She was Maddie's, and I think she only hung out with her 'cause she was so screwed up. Seriously, she shot you. How can't I be happy when such a psycho's dead?"

She... This was so sick. She felt absolutely nothing. Was this girl really the chatty, optimistic Jenna I'd laughed with not even fifteen minutes ago? Then I realized what she made me feel.

With her here, nothing I did seemed wrong. Even though everything here was total chaos, even though this seemed laced with some morbid humor I couldn't see, she made me feel normal. She really was the companion I'd been looking for. I forced myself to smile on the outside. On the inside, I struggled to push away the human part of me. I couldn't allow myself to regret.

"You wanna know how I did it?" I had to be confident, strong.

"Yeah, of course. Tell me."

I bit my lip in panic, drawing blood to the surface of the tissue, just to feel myself bleeding for a bit. Even though she was screwed up, she was still human. I couldn't...

I had to. I put a hand on her shoulder and pulled her close in a single movement that left no room for afterthoughts. She was warm. Human. No matter how much I'd wanted to resist, I couldn't with her so close to me. I leaned close to her neck, feeling her shiver. Fear or excitement? I didn't have the time or self-control do decide. Without hesitating, I bit down as hard as I could just above her collarbone. I only felt my razor-sharp teeth cut through flesh and sinew, and then a wave of incredible pleasure flowed through me.

There was nothing except me and her - no, me and her blood. The only noise I could hear as the blood in my mouth from biting my lip mingled with hers was a faint moan, a testament to that we now shared more than just blood. The steady river of blood flowing into my mouth was cooling down, proof that the life was flowing out of her faster than it felt, but I couldn't resist draining the last lukewarm drops of life from her before carefully laying her down on the pavement, her body illuminated by a few flickering squared of light from the curtained windows of the houses beside us. What if I'd just killed her? I didn't even know how to transform a human anymore. What if Aro's plan involved -

Jenna groaned and slowly opened her eyes. As if in a daze, she lifted up one hand, pawing for a pulse with the other. Touching the icy pavement as if to compare the cold, her lips began to split in a wide, surreally childish way as she pushed herself up.

As if instinctively, she crawled over to the other girl's corpse and sank her teeth into her wrist. After draining what she could, she stared straight into my dazed eyes.

"You wanna go on? We were aimin' for the nuthouse, remember?"

So this was what I was going to be calling a friend from now. I could have laughed.


	18. Warping

A/N: Seventeen chapters, and the plot is still pathetic. Gargh.

If I wrote more on this chapter, I'd have to cut off at a wierd moment, so sorry for the length.

Also, no time.

Chapter 18: Warping

I could almost have forgotten what happened moments before. We were walking along the deserted road just like two friends on a dare. We only exchanged a few words, as the situation still seemed unreal. It felt like I had to make sure this wasn't just what it felt like - a nightmare. I'd been shot in the chest twice, and I didn't even feel the pain anymore. "Wait. I have to check up."

Jenna, her whole body shaking with excitement, managed to stand still, observing me with a distance that was almost too personal. I pulled up my jacket and T-shirt and looked around for what I'd expected of a gunshot wound. I only found two holes, almost cartoonish in their linearity, without a trace of blood. So I'd only bled before because I'd wanted to?

Aro might not have had as much control over this as he'd wanted to.

I was interrupted by Jenna's shouting and her footsteps as she ran down the road in a way that still seemed half human. "Hey! No need to get emotional. We were goin', right?"

Emotional, huh? I hadn't thought of it as anything but observation, but it certainly had the potential to become philosophical. Still, there was no point in staying like this forever. I'd tried so many times, but I couldn't seem to let go of the humanity I had left. This was no time for regrets, though. I just had to let loose, cut off all conscious thought except instincts. The animal side of me welled up in a burst that seemed all too sudden. I had to act on it now, or else I'd never get anywhere. Just give up the needless self-pity. "Hey, wanna see if ya can race me?" The excitement in my voice seemed foreign to me, but I was in no position to consider anything.

"Sure! I need to burn off some of this." Her bright eyes had a glint in them that seemed out-of-place, but -

All conscious thought was cut off as I let my instincts off my mental chains. I could feel how my body began moving without even the twitch of a muscle, how everything vanished in the concrete gray blur of the buildings beside me. The only thing that seemed even remotely clear was Jenna, now not a friend, but a rival. At first, I thought she was going to fall behind, but as she let the beast in her take the reins, the only thing I saw before she was at my side was her feral smile. All sense of time vanished in this featureless red blur of raw, addicting power, until something inside me seemed to run out, and the acid burn in my throat started to sting faintly again.

I was staring into a withered patch of flowers, just beside a wooden shack that Jenna was leaning against, an unsettling blaze in her eyes, which revealed a shade of crimson. Had she already burnt off the blood so quickly? And more importantly, how much of the precious blood in my system had I wasted to fuel this vulgar show of superiority?

"You... won. But I was... almost as good." Jenna's already familiar, energetic voice was hollow and drained, as if the race had drained her willpower in addition to her blood. "Let me see... that was fifteen seconds! Y'know, this was a goddamn mile we took in fifteen seconds. This is awesome!"

At least she'd be happier with it than I'd ever be. "Oh, by the way, we're here. Creepy, eh?" The building about thirty feet from us was a huge, hulking, gunmetal-gray structure stretching towards the sky in a way that seemed faintly blasphemous, as if this half-darkened behemoth could ever reach Heaven in any way. It didn't seem likely that it would hurt anyone, though, as it was impossible to imagine a God in the featureless, pitch-black sky.

We were standing at an old storage shack on the far right side of the withered courtyard, but no lights were to be seen in the nearby windows. Only the left side, across an ocean of dessicated flowers, showed any signs of life. The ground floor and basement windows shone in the dark like beacons, and a fainter, more reddish light was coming from some of the third and fourth floor windows. The rest of the windows afforded a subtly disturbing view of white flowers and half-opened, sterile white curtains in every room in the seemingly endless row of empty, staring windows on the front facade. The whole building seemed devoid of any spirit, just a subconsciously chilling concrete husk.

"Oh, fuck yes. This is awesome." Jenna's voice, though rasping and hollow, accurately conveyed the excitement she was feeling. "Lemme tell ya a bit about this place. Ya see, there haven't been any inmates here for ages, but it's still there 'cuz they've got offices down there, in the basement." Her smile was shivering with excitement, but stable, as she kept on talking like a childhood dream had just come true. "So there shouldn't be lights on anywhere but there. But look up there, with the red lights. This is just perfect."

I wasn't prepared for this situation at all, and to my surprise, it felt fantastic.


	19. Reprieve

A/N:

Ereshkigaal (n.): A self-proclaimed "author" of unbelievable laziness and possessing a supernatural ability

to procrastinate or otherwise excuse, wheedle or worm his way out of doing his fucking stories on time.

Sorries, folks, I'm back, for better or for... scratch that, only for worse.

Chapter short. Author lazy.

Chapter 19: Reprieve

This should have scared me, or at least felt wrong in some way. So lightheartedly forgetting about what had happened before, just to avoid thinking about it.

No. This was what I needed. To be strong. I'd figured out before that it was Aro's trap, so I had to fight, not think. The door slammed open as Jenna gave it a shove, and she stepped inside, wearing a giddy smile. "Melissa, stop being so whiny. Let's enjoy this. Come on!" I had to smile, even if it wasn't the time to. All this, where I'd shown everything I was, and still she believed my name was Melissa?

I followed suit, trying to get myself into the state of mind I'd been striving for all this time - fight, don't hesitate, just act. The lights in the lobby came on as we entered, but the sodium-yellow glare just seemed to make the shadows even darker. The room was roughly circular with a crescent-shaped counter at the back. The burgundy carpet stretched across all of the floor and even further into the darkened hallways to the left and right of the counter. Identical hallways extended to our left and right, the already faint silhouettes of the walls and doors vanishing in ink-black darkness some thirty feet down. The only signs of life were coming from a staircase between the two leftmost hallways, the lobby reverberating with the sounds of footsteps climbing upwards. A late-middle-aged woman stepped up the staircase, her greying hair tied in a loose ponytail.

"What are you two doing here? It's late, and the only ones here are me and the two others on the night shift." A slight note of suspicion rang in her voice, and even as Jenna began to talk, I shifted my right foot forward and crouched slightly, ready to strike in case she called the police or rang the alarm. "Sorry, but we were out late, and Melissa here slipped on a roadkill. She's really getting nauseous 'cause she's drenched in blood, and this place was the closest to get her to." Did Jenna really expect her to believe that? Then again, we were just two girls, nothing to suspect of anything. The woman squinted faintly and stared at us, seemingly trying to pick out some unseen clue from our appearance.

Finally, she smiled warmly, and her body language became more open, her arms going from crossed to by her sides, and she beckoned to the staircase. "Ahh, poor girl. Come down here and have a cup of tea. Me and my colleagues don't have anything better to do on this godforsaken shift after we did the paperwork for the night, so now it's just keeping watch. And you there - " she stared disapprovingly at Jenna, who was still wearing all black and quite heavy makeup - "you can keep your friend company down there." Her gaze continued the sentence with a stern "Just don't you start any trouble." We walked down the stairs, which gave a faint creak every time we took a step down, and came out into a cramped office.

The shelves covered every inch of the walls and were stuffed to the brim with folders, portfolios, documents and dilapidated books. Three desks were placed close to the shelves, themselves buried in the selfsame paperwork filling the shelves. A middle-aged woman with short brown hair was brewing coffee in a small kitchen at the far left of the room. "Anne, Jason, we've got guests", the woman leading us shouted. The woman brewing coffee - Anne - turned around, and a man in his late forties with grey streaks in his dark brown hair and a pair of oval glasses stepped out of an adjoining room. Anne's expression was at first shocked, and Jason's incredulous, but the woman leading us calmed them down. "I know she looks grisly, but she slipped on a roadkill and fell right into it. She's feeling sick, so her friend brought her here."

The suspicion visibly vanished from their faces, and Jason returned to his room, while Anne continued making coffee. "Should I fix you some tea, dear?", she half-shouted over the bubbling of the old coffee machine. "Yeah, thank you." The words came out of my mouth without a thought, even though I wasn't sure I could even eat or drink. "Have a seat. Ah, I haven't given my name." The grey-haired woman sat down in a beaten-up old chair and motioned for us to sit down in the couch opposite her. "I'm Marie. I'm sure you know I work here. Now, let's have a cup of tea and a quick talk. Nothing like a cuppa to calm a sick stomach."

I felt safe.

Yet I knew I wasn't.

I wouldn't ever be out of danger.


	20. Reality

A/N: REVIEW. I like.

...twenty chapters? I seriously have to reconsider my existence.

Chapter 20: Reality

At least, it was some kind of safety.

The chat with Marie about my life and if I was still feeling sick had evolved into a friendly conversation, where even Jenna had been allowed to join in. Even though I got violently sick to my stomach from just a sip of tea, I managed to avoid grimacing and just pretended to be too nauseous to drink it, an excuse that Marie seemed to accept. The small office had begun to smell of the coffee Anne was brewing, and even Jason, who seemed to prefer being alone, had begun sorting the papers on the shelves, shielded from idle conversation by Jenna, who was keeping Marie and me busy for two.

As Marie was finishing her tea, and we were beginning to run out of topics for our conversation, a sharp knock rang out from upstairs. Even as Jason stepped out of his room out of curiosity, someone knocked on the door twice again. "Coming", Marie shouted up the stairs, as she began to climb the steep staircase, limping slightly along the way. Jenna grabbed me by the sleeve and excitedly began dragging me up the stairs. Marie was standing in the doorway, her short and frail silhouette dwarfed by the people outside. We stepped out into the lobby, trying to get a look at the strangers.

There were five persons standing outside in the light rain, black against the cloudy night sky. A tall, stubbled man in a sienna duster and a wide-brimmed brown hat was talking to Marie while distractedly smoking a cigarette. Behind him were a ragtag bunch of people, looking strangely out-of-place behind their imposing groupmate.

A blond, military-looking man with a blond buzz cut, wearing an oddly bulky denim vest and a pair of baggy jeans was standing by the man's right-hand side, and behind him, a teenaged boy, not older than 17, was skulking around, spitting on the cracked pavement and glaring at me through the hall. He was wearing a black leather jacket and ripped biker jeans, with a navy blue messenger bag slung over the shoulder. Sticking closely to his side was a girl seemingly a year or two younger than him, wearing a red parka and khaki winter boots and nervously clinging to the boy, her hands possessively buried in his long blond hair. By the stubbled man's left side, a young woman, about 21 years old, was standing, glancing around the hall with her hands buried in her black trench coat.

"Good evenin', missus. Have ya seen a chick calls herself Brandon? Should have black hair and black clothes, real nutcase." The man in the duster, though speaking politely enough, couldn't hide an unmistakable Southern accent. Brandon? The name rang a bell, though I was pretty sure I didn't know a girl who wore black and called herself by a boy's name.

Marie was clearly on the defensive, her tone stern and disapproving. "Brandon? I don't know of any girl by that name. The girl back here is called Jenna, though I trust she's not the one you're interested in." The man stared at Jenna through half-closed eyes, then looked back at Marie and slowly shook his head. "Those chicks are jus' from the city, I guess. The Brandon we're lookin' for is somethin' special, y'know, missus?" His tone was proud and faintly arrogant, which was only intensified by the fact that he was looking down at Marie, being at least six foot five and quite muscular.

"No, I do not know what you're talking about. I don't know any Brandon, and it is quite arrogant to barge in at three o' clock at night with a team of people like you and demanding to know where she is. You'd better leave before we call the police." Marie was obviously furious, clenching her teeth and glaring at the man, who was still looking disinterestedly down his nose at her.

"Watch yer mouth, ya old bat. Wouldn't wan't us to mess ya up, wouldja?" The boy was sneering at the older woman, glaring threateningly at her with stinging, ice-blue eyes. "No cops ain't gonna be comin' if we floor ya all in here 'fore ya call the cops." As Marie began shrieking at the boy, a red haze slowly rose in front of my eyes, feeling as though it was seeping into the back of my brain.

Who the fuck did they think they were, coming in here in the middle of the night and threatening an old woman who didn't know anything? I didn't care about killing anyone this time. The only thing I was thinking was that I sure as hell was gonna gut that kid. Beside me, Jenna had caught my signal, smirking and cracking her knuckles.

Let's dance, kid. Don't you act like that in front of a monster like me.


	21. Nightmare

A/N: =3

Chapter 21: Nightmare

"Hey, you fucker over there."

I wouldn't kill him right away. I'd watch him cower in fear first. As I strode over to the kid, I went through every possible way to off him in my mind. He'd probably be armed, but that wouldn't harm me. Maybe a shot to the head or being beheaded would kill me, but I wasn't gonna let that happen.

"Whaddaya want, slag?" The boy was sneering at me, his eyes filled with some kind of unfathomable aggression. "First off, I want you to shut up. Then, I want you to fuck off with your tail between your legs, or I'll gut you." No perception of anything beyond anger or my one target. The only thing I sensed was everyone's eyes on me. "Eh? Gut me? Don't screw with me. Ya really want to die?" He reached back to grab something in his bag. I didn't waste a moment. As soon as he turned his body, I smashed my right fist into his face, followed by a punch to the gut.

Even though the sound of his jaw splintering sickened something human deep inside of me, I decided to kill him off that very moment. It went so much faster than I was used to. As he doubled over, I grabbed his neck and dug my fingers into his flesh. Twisting my wrist and pulling my arm back, I heard the wet, cracking sound that signaled one more life on my conscience. Slowly surfacing through the red haze, I surveyed my surroundings. Marie was staring at the boy's corpse, her eyes wide open in terror. Jenna was grinning triumphantly, sinking into a battle-ready crouch with a wild gleam in her eye. The young woman was gritting her teeth and clenching her fists, muttering something under her breath, while the boy's girlfriend was struggling to prevent her knees from buckling under her. The military-looking man showed no emotion, only staring at the man in the duster, as if awaiting a command.

The man only smiled.

His coat billowing in the faint wind and his face shadowed by the intensifying rain, he took a single five-foot step, getting far too close to me, with not even a foot of space between us. A broad smile was spreading across his face, mirroring my own bloodthirst. "Well, looks like we were lucky. Missed Brandon, but found this 'ere demon chick. Really my lucky day, eh?" "Demon? What do you mean?" Was he calling me a demon? I was only... no, he was right. "Y'know yerself, don'tcha? Don't play dumb, vampire." Found out again. No way to help it, except killing. Or trying to win his sympathy.

"Yeah, I'm a vampire, but I'm not a demon." Smirking, I added, "It's still an insult, you know. I'm just human after all." The young woman stepped forward, a look of pure rage on her face. "Human? Demons are liars. That body you're using may once have been human, but you're not. How high are you? A fallen angel, a devil, one of the Horned One's right-hand men or just plain hellspawn?" This woman was insane. She'd probably try to kill me, so I couldn't afford to have any qualms about killing her. At least I could try to keep it human, not just kill without emotion, but put a bit of myself into it.

"Hmm, fallen angel sounds about right. But you know, you're wrong. If I was a demon, I'd have killed you right now. Actually, I don't wanna kill you all that much. You can leave now." Even though my voice was confident and arrogant, inside me, the part that was still even remotely human was clawing at the seams of my thoughts. What was I doing, taunting and ridiculing her? No, I didn't have time for this. Let go, just let go.

"What? You think I'll believe you? Like I said, demons are liars. I won't ever run away from you."

I only narrowly dodged as she lashed out at me, the glint of a machete narrowly flashing by my cheek. As I struck her clean on her left shoulder, I caught a glimpse of her face, her eyes boiling with madness.

And then she stabbed me in the stomach.

Damn, she was fast. Judging from the pain as I stepped back to ready my next strike, leaving the machete buried in my guts, it must have had gone at least seven inches in. The man in the duster was just standing at the sidelines and smirking like a madman, his burly right-hand man by his side.

As I sprang forward, grabbing her by the throat and hammered her head up against the dripping wet concrete of the asylum wall, I saw Jenna slam into the soldier, grabbing his right arm in the process and smashing her knee into his elbow in midair. The crunching noise as his arm snapped cleanly and his grunt of pain were only more signs of our victory. Maybe we were demons, but who cared as long as we could kill everyone who was out for us?

The noise slammed into my ears just a moment before the searing pain ripped its way through my chest. A burn I hadn't felt from bullets or blades tore its way through my body, bringing with it the smell of ash and the feeling of my body crumbling. The acrid stench of gunpowder drifted through the air as I slumped to the ground, managing to snap the young woman's neck with the last shred of my willpower. Struggling, I turned my head towards the man in the duster, feeling a thousand years of Hell's worth in pain for each inch I moved my agonized body.

Below the shadow of the rain and darkness, his eyes were wide with sadistic pleasure as he seemingly tried to keep himself from breaking out into laughter. In front of him, he was holding a huge gun, its jet-black paint not even glinting in the faint light.

"Th' power of God, girl. Sure as hell we're gonna clean you up."


	22. To The Face Of God

A/N: Yes, I'm a lazy bastard. I'm not really a shining example of initiative and drive, either.

Chapter 22: To The Face Of God

I wouldn't let something like that stop me. Even though pain shot through my body at even the smallest movement, getting up and acting tough could get that egoistical, arrogant asshole distracted, so Jenna could get him from behind.

I managed to push myself up, tiny flecks of ashes from the hole in my chest drifting through my blurry field of vision. This was the time to spite and taunt him, to really make him lose control.

"God? Don't fuck with me." I sneered with great effort, pulled out a crumpled cigarette from my hoodie pocket, stuck it in my mouth, lit up, inhaled and arrogantly blew a cloud of smoke in the man's direction. "That might be so many other things, but it's sure as hell not God."

He grimaced for a second, then lowered his gun and smiled. "Listen up good, girlie. I din't believe in no God either. Then one of your kind came, and I knew sure as my momma raised me good that God was watchin'." He smirked, a self-satisfied expression with no trace of humor, the smile of a killer I knew from myself. "Then I whacked its head right off with a shovel, and it din't move no more. And th' Lord right well told me that I'd done th' right thing for 'im."

His gun arm was still half raised, and his eyes were darting back and forth. Jenna seemed to have caught on to the idea and was waiting behind him with a pump-action shotgun that she seemed to have scavenged from one of the other hunters. At first her reason seemed unclear, but then I realized that he might just say too much and give his employer or superiors away.

I hadn't thought Jenna to be that bright.

Smiling half to himself, the man carried on with his tirade. "Then th' servants of th' Good Lord came to me, an' they gave me these here bullets and some folks willin' to fight with me. Of course, they weren't much use now, were they?" He lit a long, slim cigarette, as if to reciprocate my gesture of disgust. Now was as good as any other time to get closer to the truth. "The Church? Are you seriously fucking telling me that a bunch of old priests and bishops are supplying a PMC or whatever?" I instanly felt that this might have been too rough, but the man seemed to be content to demonstrate his superiority.

"Not that weak, spineless bunch of Commies you call th' Protestants. Th' real church, the one that serves a real God Almighty an' not a pitiful demon, has the guts an' the courage to give th' chosen ones shelter an' arms. Right here in this city, every Catholic church is in on it."

His face had a smug, faux-heroic expression on it, somehow serene, that didn't change before or after the click of the trigger that heralded his neck and upper back being torn to shreds by a shotgun round. Somehow, this time it was much harder to imagine that he was dead than it was with the other two. Still, his death left the hollow feeling of a Pyrrhic victory.

If the whole Catholic church was conspiring to exterminate vampires, and if all their forces were equipped like this, fighting would be hopeless.

Not every group would have the same weaknesses of a pathetic group led by a strong leader, a sentiment that was echoed by the man's severed head, longish brown hair drenched in his own blood and the cigarette still held between his paling lips in a surreal display of arrogant spite.

His body hit the ground with a heavy thump moments before his head, the cigarette falling out of his mouth and being extinguished in the rapidly pooling blood.

Marie was nowhere to be seen, and the thug's girlfriend seemed to have either fainted or simply mentally shut off. She was lying unconscious on the ground, beside the body of the man with the buzz cut, who had seemingly been killed with his own gun. Jenna was just standing there, smiling brightly like a child on Christmas morning, toting the shotgun in her arms.

With a sudden movement, she stepped over to the body of the duster-clad man, rolled his body over, peeled off his jacket, the collar of which was dripping with blood, and pulled it on. She picked up his hat, wiped it off and put it on and began trying out her mobility in the jacket, which reached her ankles, whereas it had reached the man to just below his knees.

"What do you think you're doing?" The screech came from my mouth before I noticed it. She'd just killed a man in cold blood; that was understandable, seeing how he'd acted. But putting on his clothes, without respect for the dead, without even thinking of burying him, just leaving his head rolling around on the gravel, was too much.

Still, I understood that there was no convincing her otherwise when I heard her one-word explanation, delivered with the gut-churning, sickening smile of a depraved sociopath.

"Trophy."


	23. First Final

A/N: "Creative meltdown" isn't exactly the word, and neither is "Eresh is a lazy faggot", though that last one was pretty damn close. It's more like "Eresh needs to go through his to-play and to-watch lists before he can get around to doing a fucking decent job". Here I come, Cataclysm, Kira Kira, Genocyber and Utena. Also, NaruTaru/Shadow Star, Nanoha, Texhnolyze, Black Lagoon, Genshiken and Z yeah.

Do not worry, there will be more. I am the god of being inconclusive, so I decided to split it into parts.

First Final: Epilogue of Prologue; Prologue to Second Act

Detroit, 8th October 2010, 01:23 AM

What a shithole. Yeah, it had nightclubs and stuff, but the smell of oil and rust still stuck to the place. It just wasn't big enough. Detroit was no place to live a dream.

Dahlia Evans sighed. She loved her family and her BF, of course, but in the end, she couldn't make it big in freaking Detroit of all places. She'd had to choose, and she'd chosen. Screw pollution and smog to hell, she was going to New York. Big city life and a possibility to make it big, and she didn't care whether the boy holding her hand right now was coming. She loved him and all, but her mind was made up. It was her fate, and if he began whining, she was gonna leave him there in the fucking ditch. Then, when his ex was living the high life, he'd see just why she should have listened.

Stevie squeezed her hand and smiled warmly at her. "Hey, sweetie, you all right? You look spaced out."Blond, fit, handsome and nice to boot, even though he was a bit of a chauvinist pig at times. Good catch. Dahlia smiled back and looked up at him in a way that was clearly intended to tell him that she wasn't all okay, and that she needed him to take care of him. That was how she kept her boyfriends. "Yeah, I'm fine. You're right, I was just out for a bit there. I guess I had a bit too much to drink." That was a lie, and she was proud of it. Dahlia saw herself as a nice girl, and most people would agree. But she needed to be ruthless. She'd need it the day she made it big. She put her hand around Stevie, and together they walked quietly along the Detroit streets, the light from the nightclubs being filtered through the smog to form a multicolored, luminescent haze that enveloped the city and its people in a cold, mostly sodium-yellow glow - something that made it seem special.

The glow dissipated slowly as the two came closer to the inner suburbs, where Dahlia lived. She squeezed Stevie's shoulder to make him feel like she needed to be protected from the deepening darkness. He was nice, but easy to screw with, and that was why she loved him. The smog clinging to the buildings drifted slowly away towards the city, blown by a chill wind. Stevie held his hand in front of Dahlia's face to shield her from the acrid haze blown by the sudden downdraft in a show of mock machismo.

Suddenly, his whole body twitched, so abruptly that even Dahlia got caught off guard. "Stop. Wait here, baby, there's some freak out there." He stepped forward, a look of fierce determination on his face. "Hey, freakshow, I know you're out there. Fuck off me and my girl, or I'll beat you down." Dahlia regained her composure, amused by Stevie's overdeveloped feeling of ownership. Paranoia, chauvinism and a threat, all in the same sentence.

Someone stepped out from the driveway to a closed courtyard. There were three of them. A skinny guy with a mop of tangled, light-brown hair, wearing a heavy brown woolen coat and a shy expression on his face, was backing off around the corner. The second guy looked slightly less pitiful, though the wide eyes that darted back and forth furtively from below his mussy black hair made him look quite like a scared rabbit, as did the way he fidgeted with the grey turtleneck sweater he wore.

In front of these two pathetic boys stood a girl about Dahlia's age, maybe a year or two younger, which would place her at seventeen or so. She wore her light blonde hair in two pigtails, which clashed with her arrogant pout and her frankly slutty clothes. "Who you calling a freakshow?" She tilted her head and smiled. "Is that the thanks we get for coming all the way out here to get you?" Stevie's face was getting red, and he was clearly trying to keep himself from lashing out. A spike of fear ran through Dahlia, and she knew that she had to get him away before he broke her face. She nudged him lightly with her shoulder, but he didn't react.

The girl smirked, lowered her head and looked at Dahlia through her eyelashes. "Wouldn't help. We're here for a reason, you know, and you're the first viable ones we've found." Viable ones? What was she talking about? Stevie rushed forward, red-faced and completely lost in his anger, and Dahlia closed her eyes and prepared for the sound of cracking bones. She waited breathlessly for five, then ten seconds, but no sound came. After about fifteen seconds, she began hearing Stevie grunting in pain. When she opened her eyes, she saw the girl holding his raised arm in a vice grip, now clearly accompanied by the creaking sound of bending bone rubbing against bone.

The girl turned her head, unfazed by Stevie rooting around in his windbreaker for something, and talked to the two boys behind her. "Take the guy to number seven and the chick to number two. He doesn't want us to screw up. You know what to do first, though."

An almost imperceptible nod from the black-haired guy was the only signal Dahlia got before the demure-looking, brown-haired guy leapt forward twenty feet in the blink of an eye. He landed a heavy kick on Dahlia's right shoulder, and though she nearly blacked out from the pain, she still heard the oddly fascinating sound of her own shoulder bones getting shattered.

Before she knew of it, the brown-haired boy had pinned her arms and legs down. The realization struck Dahlia with the force of a knife to the ribs. She was going to die. These people were going to kill her. She was never going to see New York, Las Vegas or Tokyo. Her life and all her dreams were going to end at just past eighteen years old. The scream that came out against her will was unlike any sound she'd thought she could make. It was a shrill, rough cry filled with every ounce of the piercing, soul-crushing despair she felt. "I don't wanna die, I don't wanna die, I can't die, I can't die..." Every word tore up her throat as she felt the blood ooze rapidly from her shattered shoulder. She noted with detached clarity that a sliver of bone had probably severed an important blood vessel. Now that she knew she was going to die, it was much easier to think of herself as just another homicide case, the body of an eighteen-year-old girl who was killed by unknown culprits a late October night in Detroit. So easy...

"Oi, Rick, move over. I want her." Through the tears that filled her field of vision, Dahlia could make out the silhouette of the blonde girl standing over her. "You heard me. I like her. Definitely bright enough to be mine. The pressure on Dahlia's body eased up, and she could just see the girl leaning in close. Her lips moved, curled in a prideful sneer that could not be hers, could not be normal. "You're mine. Forever, you hear?"

As Dahlia's vision faded out, she felt another, faint pain just above her shoulder, and then her her body, her whole soul and being, were flooded with pleasure. As she greedily hung on to the last drops of pleasure as they slowly drifted out of reach and a bitter, acidic burn flowed down her throat, she heard those words again. "You're mine. Forever. And don't you ever forget that."

Dahlia woke up to a total absence of pain. Even her mind felt anaesthetized, older emotions faint and out of reach. She was lying on a mattress on the floor in a dilapidated room, its walls a old, dusty shade of grey. She wasn't wearing the miniskirt and tube top she had been wearing before, and instead she was wearing a black T-shirt, a pair of loose navy jeans and lightweight canvas sneakers. Something was in the way of rolling over, something hard down by her hip. As she traced its contours with her fingers, she realized that it was a sheathed knife, about ten inches long. As she began to pull it out of the sheath, a now-familiar voice rang out through the room.

"Don't go trying to kill yourself with that thing now. Oh, and it was all real. Just wanted to make sure you knew that." The blonde girl was sitting lazily in a chair beside Dahlia, filing her nails. "You're alive now, and that's all that matters. Sure, you'll be working for us, but well..." Dahlia wheezed out the first words that came to her mind.

"City... I want to go... I won't... I won't make it there, will I?" The girl looked slightly amused. "The city? You wanna get into nightlife?"

Dahlia nodded weakly, surprised by that she felt so much stronger than she should have been feeling. "Heh, nightlife. That's perfect. You'll be able to do whatever you want when you're not on a job for us, so don't worry. I'll be here to help you, for a long, long time."

She extended her right hand, and Dahlia, even with her shoulder splintered mere minutes ago, effortlessly shook it by force of instinct. "I'm Chelsea. Chelsea of the Volturi, but don't worry about them right now. For now, it's me. And remember, you're mine.

Forever."


	24. Knight And Killer

A/N: Yeah.

Chapter 2-1: Knight and Killer

Daylight was slowly approaching, and I was holed up with Jenna inside the asylum. Dust covered the floor and the bed in the room we were sitting in, the white flowers in the window constantly catching my eye. Every single room here seemed to have white flowers somewhere, regardless of the connotations. One of the rooms, its walls smeared with dried, flaking blood, had had a knife and a pair of scissors lying on the bedside table, seemingly given as a present, though it seemed more like a curse. This place wasn't healthy.

Even though we were just sitting there, not really speaking, something seemed to be trying to come into my mind. It was a faint, vaguely painful buzz that was slowly wearing down my patience. Even though trying to relax was straining at best, it was the best safe place to be, as the feeling intensified further into the building, bringing with it the sharp smells of ozone and acetone and a bitter taste in my mouth.

As the sun slowly began floating over the horizon, we went into the hallway, barely sitting down before the dawn weakened our bodies, sending us into a travesty of sleep.

Only one thing was different when I woke up again. Everything was exactly as it had been the night before, as if it had somehow soaked in the stagnancy of the place, except a girl sleeping deeply with her head in my lap. After a moment of confusion, I guessed that it had to be the girlfriend of the boy I killed last night. Again, the fact that my actions had repercussions hit me squarely in what was left of my heart.

No matter how dangerous that boy had been, he'd still been a living, breathing human. He'd even gotten himself a girlfriend in some way. And now, she'd somehow found me again. It wasn't the fact that she'd located me that shocked me, but that she'd try to find me and even trust me enough to sleep in my lap for some kind of near-human contact that felt off to me. That action was completely counterlogical, bordering on suicidal, and yet she was still here. I didn't know why, and I didn't really want to get a snapshot of her thoughts after what I'd done.

I slowly lifted her head off my legs, letting her rest for a moment on the cold floor as I took off my jacket, lifted her a bit by her shoulders and folded it below her head. At least she still needed sleep, and I couldn't get cold anyway.

Jenna stirred in a doorway a bit down the hall and rose to her feet, stretching her arms by pure force of habit. Somehow, the coat and hat she'd looted from the mercenary felt more in place on her, like taking a warrior's clothes for yourself made you more of a warrior. Of course, that could just be the case.

"Yo, Melissa. Nice scrap out there yesterday, eh?" The many things about the statement that - the way she seemed to have enjoyed it even now, the fact that she could just so casually greet me after it - were compounded by her turning her back to me to look down the hallway in a reflexive show of paranoia. From the front, her duster didn't look that bad - only a few, scattered holes with a ragged abyss torn just below the collarbone, each inked with a tiny measure of blood, but at the back, the collar was drenched in the blood that was just barely visible on the deep sienna of the coat. The fabric was torn to shreds, loosely clinging to each other, and it left Jenna's upper back open, baring a portion of the shiny black jacket she was wearing underneath.

She turned her head first and then her body, her stare darting towards the girl on the floor. "I know it's an asshole move, but fuck, she kinda deserves it for walking in here." I caught a glimpse of that familiar look in her eyes, the all-consuming obsession for acquiring some kind of life and opened my mouth to speak, but she got her word in before me. "Look, if she came in here, it means she probably wants to be like us, y'know? Or else she just wants to die. At least we can give her a second chance if that's it. You on it? Seriously, just so you know, you look like a fucking monster now, the way you pretend not to be looking at her."

She was right. Right on so many points. I needed to feed. I'd have to accept it. Yesterday had really worn me out. At least we could give the girl what she seemed to want. Jenna took one look at my face and smirked, with just a bit of sly humor. "So that's it, huh? Who's first?" Of course I wanted it to be me, but I felt I couldn't let the girl into the existence she seemed to want without an apology, and somehow, she seemed too serene to wake up.

"You can take her first. I just have to fix something, okay? You got a pen and paper?" If I couldn't wake her up, I'd just write her a note so she'd know what happened. "What, you gonna write her a formal letter of apology or shit?" Jenna's expression loosened for the blink of an eye to reveal some kind of compassion. "Well, your choice. Saw some on the bedside table in where we were before." I went into the room, not pausing for even a fragment of a second, grabbed a worn pencil and half a sheet of yellowed paper from the bedside table and began writing.

"First, I want to say sorry.

I know we shouldn't have done this, but we really had no choice in the end.

That doesn't mean I don't think I'm guilty, though.

I know that what we did is probably cause more pain than good, but again, it's out of our hands in the long run, and we want to help you in whatever way we can, no matter how screwed up it is.

I feel like such a monster writing this, but keep out of the sunlight, make sure not to go hungry for too long, and don't let it take over.

I'll always be sorry for not even asking you your name.

Isabella Cullen."

In a show of honesty, I signed the letter with my full name. If she wanted to contact me, she could find me that way, and I just couldn't lie to her. Back in the hallway, Jenna was waiting for me, the only evidence of what she'd done being a faint streak of half-wiped-away blood on her cheek. "Hey, we can lick it shut. Betcha didn't know that." No matter how useful the information, I just couldn't answer through her psychotic cheeriness.

"Also, did I moan that way too yesterday? That's fucked up." "Huh. Yes." I answered distractedly, placed the paper in the girl's coat pocket, bit my lip, willed it to bleed and bit down hard on her wrist, getting every ounce of panic out by chewing up her arm as hard as I could without snapping bone or severing tendons. I didn't even feel good again this time, wouldn't let the pleasure into me.

As the girl began to twitch on the floor, I walked further down the hallway with Jenna leading the way, eager to get as far away from all the damage I'd caused as I could.


	25. The Farthest Shore

A/N: Right. Let's get going, if I can go five minutes without typoing today.

Chapter 2-2: The Farthest Shore

Detroit, 10th October 2010, 09:52 PM

"God, it sure took a lot of work getting this one to understand."

Chelsea sighed and blew a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. "Tends to take about a day or so to make them get that they're already fucking dead. If I get one like her again, I'm gonna kill someone.

Rick was slouched in a nearby chair, fidgeting with the hem of a shirt in his lap. "Huh. Yeah."

Chelsea leaned her head back and pouted. "Yeah, sure. I'm stuck in here with an antisocial, creepy knife nut and a psycho charlatan with a seriously fucked-up personality. Just my luck, dammit. Eh, by the way, know when Lucky's gonna be back?" Rick twirled his mussy hair around his finger, chewing indecisively on his lip. "Yes. I can hear him. Also, I like my knives. Don't criticize them."

Chelsea huffed and stood up abruptly, only to wince and lean up against the wall. "Fuck. I shouldn't have left it in there. Still, the guy was good for getting me in the shoulder. Just a shame it was so thin. If I move fast enough while it's in me, the blade snaps off."

She peeled back the sleeve of her t-shirt, exposing a bloodless cut about an inch long. Prying open the wound with her left thumb and index finger, she stuck in two fingers on her right hand and, wincing, pulled out a four-inch-long fragment of a knife blade that had seemingly been snapped off the end of a slightly larger weapon.

"Ow. Fuck. It hurts like a motherfucker after keeping it in for two days. Next time, I won't go easy on our prey. It was a kick, though." Chelsea stared up towards the ceiling, seemingly not caring that Rick was in the room. The door at the other end of the apartment slammed open, and the vibrations from something heavy being dropped on the floor shook the thin floor. Rick, without lifting his head or dropping the shirt he was busy modifying, spoke into thin air, as if the person had been right beside him. "Lucky? That the gear?" The black-haired boy walking into the room nodded faintly and began taking off his grey sweater. "Sure spent a lotta time this way. Havin' ta act th' honor student's really screwing with my brain."

His accent was an odd mix of Midwest, New York and Deep South, and seemingly shifted in intonation between specific words, as if he'd picked up different words in different places. "Time to get outta th' kiddie look. Jesus, whatta fucking relief." The black-haired boy shook his head, and something in the air shimmered as his shape disappeared, being replaced by a skinny, stubbled man in his late twenties with a mess of straw-blond hair. He rooted around in his shirt pocket and pulled out a polished steel cigarette case, took one between his teeth, held a finger to the tip and smiled self-consciously as it began smoldering. He took a long drag, relaxing visibly while he blew the smoke back out again. "So? What's the news back here?"

Chelsea frowned and flicked the knife fragment in her hand over her shoulder. "First off, stop your tricks. All of us can do the disguise, but you just like flashing it. Also, just because you picked up the fire trick from Aro doesn't mean you'll ever use it for anything else than lighting up. Live up to your name and give us some of that luck. We fucking well need it." Lucky chewed on his cigarette in a show of mock nervosity. "Hey, hey, go easy on me, girl. I need a bit o' time to settle back in." He took a huge drag of the cigarette, taking the ash three-quarters of the way to the filter. Chelsea sighed heavily, stood up straight and crossed her arms. "Christ, do you never fucking learn? You need to get your ass in gear, or we'll get sacked. Also, I'm not a "girl", at least not the way you mean it. I've said it a thousand times, retard. We don't age, and unfortunately, neither do you. I was born in 1968, and I've told you. You're from '83. You're twenty-seven, I'm forty-two. Difference."

Lucky took a last, crackling wheeze of his smoke, burning the filter halfway down, and spat it out on the floor. "Yeah, but yer not that old mentally. You're not a housewife or shit." Chelsea sighed, put one foot against the wall and tilted her head. "For once you're right, wankstain. But that's not all a compliment, right?" Lucky took another smoke from his case and lit it with a touch of his finger. "Ding fuckin' dong. You've just won the grand prize, lil' miss. Wanna get the bullet in the head here or take it home with you?" Chelsea snorted and flipped her hair, then strode out to the middle of the floor.

"Very fucking funny, joker. Well, enough talking. Let's get to the point. Lucky, you've got your guns, I've got my fucking jailbait charms, and Rick doesn't like guns, so the nutter has his knives. We're supposed to be out there, watching the new ones' backs and do the job for them if they can't take the heat. Let's go, or Aro will have our asses."

Port Angeles Local Police, noticeboard, 10th October 2010

Found this one on some crazy guy's site. Posted from one of the computers at the library. I thought Willis and all his paranormal-activity nutters might get their jollies from reading this, that is if they don't believe it.

- Samuelson

"I just came back home to the North after a trip to Vegas with my S.O. We left after things started going wrong. People started disappearing, then coming back again as the prime suspects in new crimes. The cops are freaked out.

Back in Forks, it's just as insane. Murders everywhere, in just a few days. My friend's family is gone. I'm afraid they've taken her.

EDIT: We had our first confrontation with one of them this night. I managed to shoot it 'til it couldn't move, then I smashed its brains in, severed its spine, drove a stake through its heart and put a lighter to it. When I threw it in the sea, it'd just stopped twitching. I might be going crazy, but I don't want him and me to die, and I wanna save my friend.

EDIT: I just got a call. The guy said he was Father Jeremiah David Canyon, and that he'd help me "exorcize the demons." I really dunno if I can trust him, but I'll call him back. I'll do all I can.

- Angela W."

Completely bats. Hey, Willis van Helsing, this one's for you.

- Freddy


	26. Leave The Past Behind

A/N: For Chrissake, please review. It's a help for me - look, I started layouting - and I kinda like getting my ego stroked. So please drop a review - it's not that hard.

Chapter 2-3: Leave the Past Behind

This place was getting worse and worse. Even Jenna had stopped talking. She'd been inordinately enthusiastic just before, but now, the building seemed to have affected her just as much as me. The ringing in my ears, which had been faint before, had become a painful howling, and the smell of acetone seemed to burn all the way through my body. My vision was blotchy and occasionally overlaid with wierd glimpses of images that I couldn't quite focus on. Still, I felt I needed to go on. I didn't know why. It felt like there would be a reward, like I'd find out why I came here.

Somehow, I found myself on my hands and knees, but I didn't care. The feeling that there was something to struggle for had grown stronger, completely overpowering me. The images became sharper as my vision became blotchier, and soon the faded sequences of images were to prefer to the reality that was becoming blacker every second. I faintly felt my numb body slump up against the wall, my limbs heavy amidst the thick haze surrounding me.

A bird. Either a crow or a raven. A large, white building, dignified and Victorian in construction. A young girl, no more than thirteen or fourteen, staggering jerkily around a large field, being watched from afar by a middle-aged woman and two young men. The girl approached the bird, which had perched on a low branch. Here, the images flickered and blurred, bringing with them an intense headache. The next thing I could see was the girl holding the crow - it was clearly a crow - by its legs and managing to snap its neck with one hand. As the supervisors came running to stop her, she tore into the bird with her dirty nails, staining her loose, white clothes.

Just before the supervisors grabbed her under her arms and pulled her away, she managed to rip out a mouthful of feathers and bloody meat from the dead bird, not out of hunger or greed, but something else, something fueled by the longing in her eyes. As the middle-aged supervisor screamed at her, I couldn't understand a word through the haze of memories, but the girl's answer rang crystal clear. "But Miss, he grants me good luck for it! If I'd known, I'd still have her!"

I got a quick glimpse of a white room with thick layers of cloth on the walls, with the girl, just washed and in clean clothes, lying on the middle of the floor. She bit her lip, hard enough to make herself bleed, whereafter she dragged her index finger across the bloodied area and drew a symbol on the floor.

I only managed to make out a vague image of the symbol - a downward-pointing triangle with a double cross inside it, the lines breaking out of the sides of the triangle and taking a fresh smear of blood with them - before the images disappeared, leaving behind only a featureless grey spreading across my vision, broken quickly by a wild scream that seemed to rip into my brain.

As if through the memories of another, I felt something about the symbol. Its meaning was foreign to me, as it was to the person whose memories these were - they were memories, I was sure of that - but the feeling of it, its very shape, exuded a feeling of foreboding and fear, like the feeling of standing on a mile-high cliff and knowing that there's no choice but to jump.

The greyish-red nothingness was replaced, like a shift in consciousness, by a sight so gruesome I had no choice but to ineffectually scratch at my eyes, my hands being the only thing I could feel. These were not memories, I was sure of that. These were the worst scenarios that could be thought up by a broken mind. A field, stretching on and on forever, beyond the horizon, over the oceans, of twisted, torn-apart bodies.

The sky was a plagued brown, broken here and there by flashes of a green like that of rotting, infected flesh. Spears and swords, each one made only of metal, a dull greyish-black alloy, protruded from every single body, and thousands more reached up from below, from the miles-deep ocean of bodies.

A slab of steel, untainted by even a drop of the blood that was drowning the world around it, lay in the middle of the carnage, with nothing upon it but a single figure, white-haired and pale-skinned. Suspended in the air above him were about a dozen bodies, each riddled with nails, chains and hooks. Their faces were twisted in pain, the faces of -

I was woken by a hard kick to the side. My mouth tasted of rust and chlorine. I vaguely sensed two figures towering over me, talking to each other. As soon as I heard one speak, I could recognize Jenna's voice, but warped, as if I was hearing it through static.

"So ya say that was you?" Another voice, familiar but distorted, like she'd been screaming for days, spoke. I couldn't remember the person, and black clothes were the only things I could see of her.

"Yes. I'm sorry for it all. I really hate when stuff like this happens."

Pause.

"I thought you wouldn't come here, that I wouldn't attract you with what I did, but I guess I was wrong."

I could hear Jenna speaking again, her voice breaking through the veil of static. "Oh wow. Holy fuck. I thought I was bein' a bit eager to go here, but well, I'd never guessed there was someone as screwed up as you behind it. Well, didja know Melissa here?" The other person spoke again.

"Hm? Did she tell you that was her name? Sorry to break it to you, but she was lying. Her name is Bella.

Ah, by the way -" I could slowly make out a familiar, black-haired silhouette through the blur "- I shouldn't be lying to you either, eh? I gave you my surname before. My first name is Mary, but hell, nobody calls me that anymore." Mary? Like in Brandon? "Well, I guess I've used enough false names in my time. I'm Alice, basically."


	27. We Are Judgment

A/N: Yes, I'm lazy. Also, if you think the writing here seems spacey, it's because it's on the wrong side of midnight and on the wrong side of a couple of caffeinated, sugar-heavy beverages.

Well, now it's 8 in the evening, and I'm still on the wrong side of midnight.

Chapter 2-4: We Are Judgment

Outskirts of Seattle, 11th October 2010, 08:47 PM

The rain was coming down like a flood, washing away every trace of life on the streets. The streets were empty, and every window in sight was tightly closed and the curtains pulled. The only sign that the dismal suburbs were even host to human life was a gathering of people in a narrow alley, leaning against the walls to avoid the pouring rain. Only one man was standing in the middle of the alley, allowing himself to get drenched, but he didn't seem to care, smiling beatifically at his comrades.

He had blue eyes and light brown hair that was faintly streaked with grey. Even though his face was weathered, and he spoke with the gravitas of an old sage, his expression wouldn't have looked out of place on a much younger man. He straightened up, looked towards the people leaning up against the peeling grey of the walls with a forgiving glance, and spoke. "Our day has come, my siblings under the Lord. This world has been tainted for so long, but at last the armies of Lucifer have fallen victim to their own imperfection." He closed his eyes and smiled widely, turning his face towards the grey sky.

"The traitors in our midst have been judged. Robert Erston, Priscilla Zachary, Jonathan Evans and Christopher Jones let their delusions control them, and they acted without our permission." The man stroked the silver cross on his necklace and kissed it, like a man might kiss his old, wizened mother. A youthful fervor lit up his eyes as he spoke. "They were misled. We are not. We will go forth in the name of our Lord, and we will show no mercy if anything comes in our way. We will bring salvation to the lost, and we will bring judgment to the unredeemable." He looked down at his comrades, seeking to gain eye contact with the soaked, dark figures under the overhangs of the buildings rising around them.

"As true as the Lord is merciful, and as true as that He has watched over every one of us from we came from the womb, I know the hearts and souls of all those of you who I have fought beside. But some of you are new, and seeking salvation. Our Church has granted you the power to forgive and the strength to see what others do not, and I dearly hope that our words have not gone unheard." A young man in a soaking wet woolen coat had closed his eyes and was muttering under his breath. The older man laid a bare hand upon his shoulder and spoke to him in a soft voice. "Do not worry. You are far from alone, and you do not need to believe. It will come, after you have done your duty. Adam Howard, I will watch over you, and you shall know that you are not alone."

The man smirked faintly and added; "I do hope you will not fail in the same way as your namesake. They are the Snake, every one of them, and no matter how they may act, they speak only lies." The young man exhaled, opening his eyes and staring into the splashing water at his feet, his hands clenching with what little determination he could muster.

"And you two." The older man walked through a puddle of water to two figures, one male and one female. The woman wore a hooded jacket with a black coat draped over her. She was clutching a steel-grey gun in her hand, and water was dripping all over her from her soaked dark-brown hair. The man was holding a shotgun and wearing a navy denim jacket and a grey fedora. His face was pale, and his eyes were darkened and swollen from lack of rest. "This is your time to fight. I understand that you have lost more than you have ever feared. You, more than everyone else, should understand what it means to fall victim to Satan's spawn. Ben, I know your name, and I know your story. You are a brave man for coming this far. And you, Angela Weber..."

The older man pushed up the woman's chin with his rain-soaked right hand, looking into her darkened eyes. "You show promise. You were strong enough to defeat one of those hellspawn, wise enough to accept my call and cunning enough to make your way to the meeting. I would hate to see someone as promising as you, or your lover, for that matter, perish at the hands of this filth." The man turned around to face the others and looked up to the sky again.

"We strike tonight, and we will win tonight. The powers that our Lord had given Priscilla Zachary granted her the will to alert us, even when she was mortally wounded. Hopefully, her time in the cleansing fires will be short. Our primary target is the demon known as Mary Alice Brandon. Her strength is greater than you might think, so be wary. She seems to have met with two others, a woman in black cultish garb and another girl, who Priscilla has told us is convinced that she acts by herself. Make yourselves ready, and say the prayers that might be your last." The hunters began muttering amongst themselves, reciting their last wishes to their God. Only one word was not a prayer or a praise for the divine.

"Bella..."


	28. Potential Truth

A/N: Yeah, well, I'm still alive. Spread the bad news.

Chapter 2-5: Potential Truth

"Ow. Shit."

Even though I'd mostly healed up the hole in my chest while I slept, it still sent a spike of pain through me as I got up off the floor. There was still a small hole in my jacket, but the bullet didn't seem to burn cloth, only my flesh.

We were standing in a room that had quite possibly been a staff room or used for occupational therapy before the place was closed. The wallpaper was peeling and the single chair in the room was broken - an entirely unwanted moment of irony for three people who had need for neither comfort nor rest. One wall was splintered and littered with stab marks from someone viciously tearing at it with some kind of bladed weapon.

Alice was sitting on the desk in the middle of the room, looking uncharacteristically down-to-earth in plain black clothes and no makeup. Jenna was leaning up against the wall, rooting through her coat pockets, hoping, I guessed, to find stuff the dead man had left in there.

"So. Let's find out just what happened here." Alice's voice rang out through the room, made flat and hard by the oppressive acoustics. "First of all, I want to know who you are." Jenna twitched a bit and went back to rooting around in her pockets. "I told ya. I'm Jenna. Happy?" I didn't intervene, leaving Alice to question her. Neither of them seemed to like the other - Jenna thought Alice too prying and invasive, while Alice plain distrusted the temperamental and secretive Jenna, who was beginning to show a bit of an obstinate side.

"I know your name. You've told me twice already. What I want to know is your real name, what you're doing here, and why you don't want to talk." Alice fixed Jenna with a steely glare that seemed out of place on someone I knew as being capricious and flighty. "I don't want to throw my weight around, but I don't need to look at you twice to know I could ash you in five seconds. Let me ask again; who the fuck are you?" I'd never really heard Alice swear like that before. Sure, cuss a little, but this really seemed too light a matter for her to get that in-your-face. Jenna began talking while I was deliberating how to break up the tension.

"Fine. I don't want that mind-rape of yours again. Jennifer Richards, though if I hear ya call me that even once, I'll make ya fucking swallow your own guts. No criminal record as of yet, twenty-two years old, born in Des Moines and spent the last three years trying to get the hell outta that place. Happy now, fairyland reject?" Alice, visibly ticked off, exhaled and deliberated her words for a while. "You forgot to tell me why you ditched town. If I can trust you, I won't need to be so brash. I don't like this, you know."

Jenna crossed her arms behind her back and stared down at the floor, like a huffy child. "My mother died at the hospital after a mugging. After that, I was his wife, all the time. I never went to school again after that. My father was afraid that I'd go the same way. Before ya feel flattered, I've told people this a billion times. They tried to cure me, but I'm not the problem. He was, and they were all too weak to solve him instead." She inhaled and looked up towards the ceiling for a while before resuming. "And 'cuz ya can ash me, I'll give you the juicy details, bitch. Ya better be thankful."

She shuddered a bit, as if shaking some invisible stain off herself. "I've no problems facing what happened after that. It got all over the news when I outed him, but the son of a bitch had to have a trial. They moved him to a new place to keep him away from my mom's stuff, and I found him there and made sure he was dead. The shrink said I did it 57 times. Like I'd ever care. He had to die. The people in charge ditched the case 'cuz they didn't want the bad PR on their hands protecting the memory of a rapist and child abuser, and I got a nice bit of money and a life. Happy now? I've went through so much more shit than you have."

Jenna clenched her fists and made a reflexive sobbing motion before continuing. "I saw your little trip down memory lane there. I can guess you're batfuck insane, and you're overloading it out here. Not that hard to guess, seeing as your little trick's mind rape. But you're insane without an excuse, and I'm still sane, even though I have an excuse. Think about that next time you want to feel superior, bitch." She bit her lip and stared at the ceiling in the silence that followed.

I'd never thought that someone like Jenna, that cheery girl, would have a past like that. Nevertheless, I wasn't exactly overwhelmed by sympathy. The way she was acting had certainly outweighed any good karma she'd managed to rack up. But what caught my attention was what she was saying about Alice. She'd spent time at an asylum, but her memory block had saved her from the insanity she'd suffered. Did that mean...

"Yeah. If you wanna put it that way, I'm insane. Not the way I was, though. I can still recognize what's real and what's not, but it's wearing away at me. And don't think any of you will be safe. What I feared most was ...those days coming back to me. That's why I blocked it out. That's why they came back, too." Feared? What I feared most was my humanity slipping away. So that meant Aro was playing on our fears?

"Edward's having it wear on him, too. He always thought he didn't have a soul. Now, everything is pointing towards it. Jasper's fear was much like yours, Bella. He was afraid of being unnatural, of being rejected. Now even I can feel he's not human. If you thought this was just a half-assed move by Aro, forget it. He knows what he's doing, and he's trying to finish us off without a fight."

After a bit of silence, I spoke. The emotions I'd felt so strongly just a few days ago towards Edward and Renesmee were faded and only slowly returning.

"Edward... How are Edward and Nessie? And the others?" Alice closed her eyes and groaned. "Edward's going down the slippery slope. Jasper and Emmett are taking out aggression further down south in the city, and they're calling once in a while. Emmett put his bodycount at 134, thirty of them cops. Only a matter of time before they'll have to release their instincts in a new place. We left Rose with the Quileutes to make up the differences. She's human now, mostly. Aro's draught really did work. I still don't want to do what he wants, though. Carlisle's gone, together with Esme. Seems Edward's known there were some holes in his backstory all along, and he chose to call him out on it. Nessie... we don't know where she is, but we do know that she's alive. She was affected too, as were her friends. Lily was killed by a vampire hunter, and we're not sure we can keep Nessie from killing somebody in her state."

Nessie... Edward... I guessed I had to help them. I felt too drunk on my new power to care, even after all this, but this was something I had to do.

With a loud cough, Jenna broke in. "Nice that you two are having your family reunion there and gossiping about the other vamps, but I have no goddamn idea what you're saying. First off, just who the fuck is Aro?"

Alice twitched and looked in the direction of the hallway. "Nice that you're worrying, Jennifer" - she said the name with a sneer - "but we'll have to fight first. Hunters aren't much of a threat alone, but we have twenty people here. Probably armed with blessed ammunition and someone with a strong enough belief to keep us at bay with a cross. This is gonna be one hell of a fight, and not in the good way."


	29. Loss and Repayment

A/N: Whew.

All yuri fans out there, yours dearest, the mighty destroyer of all literary quality, has had a sudden streak of inspiration while watching Hidamari

Sketch and thinking of Nana to Kaoru, all that late at night with three other very scary people while on a dose of Red Bull, Pringles and soda

that could kill a horse. Look out for my feared femslash, the one remedy for faith in humanity and its ability to write porn.

Also, werewolves and gore.

Chapter 2-6: Loss and Repayment

Downtown Seattle, 11th October 2010, 05:48 PM

The city was alight with the radiance of the setting sun. Though clouds were gathering on the horizon, it was easy to forget when seeing the entirety of Seattle bathed in a bright golden-bronze glow, like the Messiah himself had parted the heavens to visit. In the narrower alleys, though, it was just as easy to forget that there had ever been a human concept of "heaven". A motley gang of youths were drinking and shouting around the corner of an alley just off a downtown street, the concrete around them scattered with beer cans and yellowed cigarette butts. In the middle of the circle they formed, a girl was lying on the ground, half-naked and covered in spit and vomit. Tears were running down her cheeks, drawing thick black stripes of flowing makeup down her face and neck.

"Oi, Park, she's not naked yet. Should we drink to find out who gets to take her bra?" A stubbled boy, not even remotely near eighteen yet, was gulping down a can of cheap beer, not caring whether his shirt got soaked or not.

"Fuck no. I'm gonna take her panties first, and I'm gonna screw her till she breaks. Such a fucking teacher's pet." The boy called Park, a clean-shaven young man wearing a green baseball cap, stood up, walked over to the girl and kicked her hard in the stomach. She winced, but she seemed accustomed to the pain by this point.

"Just because you get good grades doesn't give you the right to rat on us, you bitch." He stomped down hard on her hand, grinding her fingers against the rugged concrete. "You know what happens to narcs in the Mafia, don't you? Well, we're not them, so if you just lie down and take us all in a row, we're gonna let you go. But if you make just one noise, I'll call my cousin to chain you into a fridge and throw you in the sea, you get?"

Park was growling through his teeth and punctuated his last two words with two kicks to the girl's ribcage. "And we ain't gonna use a rubber, so get ready to drop out. If you kill my kid" - Park smiled without a trace of humor, a sadistic rictus grin that bared his yellowed teeth - "I'll make sure you get a shotgun mouthwash." The rest of the gang was laughing, though much of it seemed forced, and some people were beginning to inch away from the scene. "So, let's -"

"Just in time, huh?" Two young women had stepped into the alley, their faces showing only confidence and a grim expectation. "I can't stand shit like that. Childhood scars." The one speaking was blonde and had the body of an angel. She'd probably once had the face to match, but the look on her face was that of someone way too deep in problems for their own good. "Fucking gutter trash, all of you. Leave her alone, or we'll slice you to ribbons."

Park turned to face them, easily towering over the blonde one by a good head or so, but just the height for him to lock eyes with the other girl. She was quite tan, with more than a hint of Native ancestry and short black hair that was cut to just above her ears. She was thin, but wiry, and there was no doubt that she'd had quite a bit of training. "So what you want?" Park growled at the girls through gritted teeth, leaning forward in a way that seemed intended to threaten. "Stop." The black-haired girl's voice was the kind that could stop a man twice Park's size in his tracks, but he still continued to speak. "That bitch ratted on us to the cops. We never done anything to her, but she narcs on us. You think that's fair?" The blonde girl smirked and spoke, with more than a bit of smugness and pride in her voice. "Well then, if you wanna get us out, you piece of gutter shit, then make us." She raised her chin in a theatrical preparation for a punch.

"No, I couldn't do that to you." Park's voice became smooth like honey, and he leaned a bit closer to the girl. "If you let off us, I'll give you the time of your life. Not that reservation trash friend of yours, though. She's gonna get the special treatment." The blonde girl ignored Park's rant and kept on talking. "I'm saying punch me. Gimme all you've got." Park's sugar-sweet mask fell, and his face contorted in a bitter grimace. Reaching down to his waist, he pulled out a pair of brass knuckles. Slipping them onto his hands, in the almost physical light of the other gang members' awe and admiration, he fired off two hard and fast punches to the girl's face.

"That nearly hurt, you know." Park's blows had split the girl's lip, but over the course of a few seconds, the cut healed, leaving only a few drops of blood. "I can see why they respect you so much. Now, I'll show you my punch." The girl flexed her fingers, and with a loud crack of grinding bone, they lengthened and darkened into dagger-length black claws.

Her smile, previously simply proud and determined, warped into a predatory grin. "I know you're not them, but you're so much alike. This is what you get for hitting a girl." She lunged forward at an impossible speed, so fast that it should have snapped her tendons and frayed her muscles instantly. Before the rapidly dwindling crowd of thugs could even react, she had sunk her claws deep into Park's stomach, bodily fluids rapidly staining his grey jacket a brownish red. She pulled close to him, so close that he could feel her hot breath in his face. She grinned widely, and with the sound of receding flesh and grinding enamel, her teeth slowly grew longer and vaguely canine. "How'd you like that, huh?"

Park was wheezing and gasping for breath, the girl's claws churning his intestines and a rapidly growing pool of blood forming at his feet. "Heh... I think it's... sexy." His words sounded like they were coming from a dreaming man, his skin growing pale and his pupils widening in barely suppressed terror. At first, the girl seemed to be flattered by his words, even vaguely smiling in a wholly human way. The next moment, she narrowed her eyes and bared her jagged teeth, growling under her breath. "Don't fucking say that. I'm not going to be anyone's toy anymore." Her words came out in a low hiss, wheezing past her teeth like every sound was a death threat.

"I'd rather die before I let a man touch me again." She lowered her head in a doll-like jerk, bringing her face just an inch from Park's neck. With a low, canine noise, she ripped into his throat, tearing out flesh and tendons and sending another gout of blood pouring towards the ground. Shaking Park's twitching body from her claws, she cast a glance around the alley, seeing no trace of any of the thugs anymore.

"Well, that was fun. Shame he didn't have a lot of guts at all." The black-haired girl just stood off to the side, surveying the carnage with distant eyes, like the tired parent of a disobedient child. "Hey, you." The girl on the ground raised her head a few painful inches, her eyes sticky with tears and blood. "You're gonna live, I guess. You better do. I won't have you dying on me."

The blonde girl retracted her claws, hard, black tissue slipping seamlessly back into human flesh. "I didn't do this for you, you know. This was for myself. Get home, and I'll meet you in a week if you have any questions." She walked out onto the street, her companion following at her side. The Seattle streets were getting dark, and the blood on the girls' dark clothes was near-impossible to spot in the rapidly fading sunlight.

"You should stop. You really messed up our reputation there." The black-haired girl spoke with a streak of exasperation, but tinged with forgiveness, like she was just as bad herself. "Oh come on, Leah." The blonde straightened her hair out with her fingers, glancing up at the sky. "Since when have you Quileute dogs had any concern for that? I'm not a Cullen anymore. At least I'm not a bloodsucker. I don't need fame or jewelry anymore. I told you, I'm not Hale, King or Cullen anymore. I just wanna be Rosalie. Any problem, Leah?"

Leah sighed audibly and clenched her fists. "Look, Rose, we have traditions. Rules. Just because you came in in a way we haven't seen before doesn't mean you can mess up our name. We're just as much a clan as we're a race. You can be an unkempt street dog, but we are wolves at heart. We have pride and honor, and you're losing yours fast. A bit too far and you'll go off the deep end." Leah bit her lip, as if suppressing an unpleasant memory. "We don't need one more. Please, for my sake, just don't lose it like he did."


	30. White Fire

A/N: At least I'm trying, dammit.

I write bad action scenes, IknowIknow.

WRITER'S BLAAAAAAAAAAAAWK

Chapter 2-7: White Fire

"I'll take the window. Bella and Jennifer, you stay here and take care of the main group."

With those words, Alice casually strolled up to the wide window facing towards the road, opened it, and flipped herself out with an effortless movement. Jenna bit her lip and muttered under her breath. "Main group my ass. I dunno who your friend is, but if she's trying to get us killed, I'll rip her head off." I leaned against the wall, listening for any possible intruders. "I hate to ask you, but how many do you think you can take?"

Jenna flexed her fingers in a probing manner, like she was moving them for the first time. "Well, I guess if I'm pissed enough, I could take ten or fifteen. The scrap we had out there felt like nothing." Was it actual skill or just arrogance? "You really think you can? I took a bullet to the chest out there, and it hurts like a bitch." It felt awkward to talk about being injured in ways that would kill a human instantly so casually, like it really was nothing. Of course it was.

"Fuck it. They're coming. I'm gettin' psyched now." She pushed herself away from the wall with a flick of her left hand and turned to face the door.

It really went so fast, even by the standards I had by now. I wasn't sure if it was Jenna, me or just my refusal to see what was going on.

The instant the door opened, Jenna grabbed the first hunter by the throat and pulled her arm back, giving a clean snap as his eyes rolled back in his head. Someone leapt out at her, knife in hand, the fervor in his expression making his eyes light up like twin torches in the dimly lit room.

Jenna took the blade clean to the chest, barely grimacing at nine inches of steel sinking in between her ribs, seized the man's arm and slammed him into the wall.

As the hunter, struggling for breath, raised his arm again, Jenna grabbed his hand and, with a sickening salvo of cracking bone, twisted both his hand and the knife it held towards his chest. Instead of running him through with his own knife, though, she swiped the blade upwards, sending a wave of blood pulsing from his throat.

As Jenna fought, something inside me was churning. This was a massacre. We had an advantageous position in a large room, and the hunters were struggling to even move inside the hallway. Would it be right to step in? It was going to be a bloodbath if I stepped in.

Whatever. This was my chance. I'd never be able to get revenge on Aro if I couldn't even deal out payback for being shot in the chest.

As the rush of hunters intensified, their morale heightening in a burst of fear-induced zeal, Jenna's advantage was rapidly fading. A hunter's bullet had ripped away her left cheek, baring her teeth in a horrific grimace. Her clothes were torn, and a hunter had pushed past her, pulling what looked like a wooden stake from his clothes.

No fucking way.

So many times, looking back, I've felt equal pride and horror in the thought of how that hunter must have felt. As he pulled out a hammer from his coat, I grabbed his head, tugged him backwards, and spoke the first words I thought of in his ear.

"Not my friends."

With my right hand, I twisted his head backwards over my shoulder, a trickle of blood from a small tear in his skin dripping down the back of my jacket. Baring my teeth in preparation for a vengeance that would never come, I heard Jenna wheeze out a cry of victory.

"You're th' last one, you son of a bitch."

She'd seized a hunter by the head, her nails digging into his face, and was holding him a foot above the ground. "How'd you ever think you could win, you fucking runt?" Her face was covered by a multitude of cuts and tears, rendering her nearly unrecognizable in the darkness of the hallway. The hunter laughed, a hollow, coughing sound that seemed more sickly than humorless.

"Smile while you can. The more of us you kill, the harsher your judgment will be the day you're thrown into Hell. Do me a favor and kill the newbies back there. I'll be looking down from Heaven and laughing."

For a moment, Jenna froze, as if something inside the ocean of rage in her eyes had cooled down. Then, pulling her lips back in a maddened smile, she dug her fingers into his head, grinding her hand through bone and flesh like it was air.

"Bullshit. Let's wait an' see."

I was equally paralyzed and fascinated. She was a total monster, yes, but all the less need for me to kill as much. I sensed the hypocrisy in feeling better about making someone kill for me, but something like that didn't matter now.

Jenna strode forward, with me following in her wake like an owner with his dog. Grabbing a knife from a dead hunter's hands, she stalked down the hallway, the flesh on her face knitting together in a patchwork of crimson tissue. Two hunters were cowering in a dead end, by a locked door. Something about them made my heart twinge, but I couldn't care less why as Jenna, smiling, walked down the hallway and raised her knife for the finishing blow.

Fuck. Angela and Ben. Angela was standing up, clutching a gun like it was a security blanket. Her eyes were wide, and her face was drawn and haggard. Ben was leaning against the wall, looking like his legs had stopped supporting his weight.

As Jenna brought down her knife against Angela, I grabbed her by the shoulder and attempted to move her away. The knife ripped across Angela's left temple, scratching deeply across her eye. As Jenna turned to shake me off, I swept her legs away from under her and threw her down the hallway.

I took her by the wrist and ran down the hallway, back into the room.

She stared at me, the air of familiarity in her eyes replaced by something different, primal and utterly empty.

"Why'd you let them get away? They're gonna bring more of those wankers, and then they'll know how many people to bring."

I flinched, taken aback by her sudden hostility, and then tried to get back my composure.

"They were friends. I promise they won't..."

She sneered, tugging at the silvery-red scar tissue at the corner of her mouth.

"Fucking good friends, trying to off you. I'll tell you, from what I've met of your friends, I don't like them at fucking all. Give me an opening, and I'll kill them. Don't even dare to interfere with me."


	31. Apocrypha

A/N: Well, well, well.

Chapter 2-8: Apocrypha

"Oh my, oh my."

Aro smiled and leaned a tiny bit forwards, pushing himself up a little from the carved throne he sat on.

"So, it's finally moving. Took a bit, but we're all set now."

He took a deep breath and smiled blissfully, like an overjoyed child.

"My apologies, sir. If we had been faster, this could have happened the very day after."

A woman with short brown hair and a frail, lanky build bowed before him, fumbling obsessively with her tie knot.

"No worries, Renata. The stage is set, the enemies are showing up, one by one... some old, some recent and some new ones altogether."

Aro stood up, brushed his hair back and gazed up at the vaulted ceiling of the Volterra castle.

"I am very impressed with what you have done. Now, after all this, our enemies might learn to fear the dreaded Renata the Stitcher again."

Renata pulled even more at her tie and fiddled with the sleeves of her black suit before speaking.

"Sir, I have never deserved that name. I am not the warrior I might have been seen as. I am simply an envoy, an employee and a servant, nothing else."

Aro's smile grew wider, baring the corner of one sharp tooth. He placed one hand on Renata's shoulder and appeared to ignore the shiver going through her.

"You might not have fought much, but now the ritual is gone. The Sibyl is dead by my hand, as was her punishment for holding on to the past. The one privilege her actions have granted you is now ash, just like she is. The only thing you have left is what made you known as the Stitcher, and it is a fearsome thing indeed. I look forward to seeing you act."

He ran his fingers down her shoulder, grabbing her tie and pulling her up from her bowing pose. The shadows of the two were cast around in the circular room like demons running from the light of the chandelier overhead.

"You, Renata. You are my creation, my favorite. If anyone can stand by my side and turn the tables on that filthy man's brood, it's you. Lady Luck truly was with me that day."

He let go of her tie, seemingly paying no attention to her shivering as she fell to the floor.

"Do you have anything more to say? If not, I am afraid you must leave at once."

Aro's smile broadened even further as Renata stood up straight, brushed off her pants and answered.

"O-of course, sir. The new Cullen woman's daughter - "

"Ah." The broad smile that had been on Aro's face shrank, until only a glimpse of his teeth was to be seen. "So, is it an anomaly, or has the revocation of that filthy witch's curse affected her too?"

"It has, sir. She is currently the sire of one newborn, who herself has sired another. The three seem to be pursuing a personal goal."

Aro licked his lips and chuckled under his breath.

"So, on paper, it has nothing to do with us, has it? Make sure they are made to meet Chelsea if the situation turns amusing."

"Yes, sir. Also, the Forgiven - "

All traces of Aro's smile vanished. He bit down hard on his lip and clenched his fists tightly. He took a deep breath and unclenched his hands, but the smile did not return.

"What about them? Have those worthless lowlifes gotten involved?"

"No, sir. Not yet. There has been an incident, and the mortal police is on the case. Intelligence tells us that disbelief will not be an aid here. The detective assigned, Frank Willis, seems conscious of the existence of other sentient creatures than humans."

Aro breathed out, a long, resounding sigh that seemed to wash away all the tension from inside him and spread it through the room. He sat down again, twisting a lock of hair around his finger for a minute and breathed in again.

"As he is just a mortal, keep him from harm until he has provided for an amusing distraction. If any of the Forgiven become involved, however, slaughter everyone related. I want you, personally, to take care of this should an unsafe situation arise."

Renata tugged at her tie once again and adjusted the buttons at her collar before answering.

"Ah. Y-yes, sir. If it is your order, I will teach them how hard it is to fight something they cannot kill. Your reunion will continue to approach, unobstructed, for as long as I live."

Aro rested his arms on the throne, running his fingers along the cold, grey-black granite.

"Nothing will stop the reunion. Not the Forgiven... not the Watching One... nor will you, Brother. Nor will you."


	32. Black Water

A/N: Let's see.

Chapter 2-9: Black Water

Northwest Seattle, 12th October 2010, 2:47 AM

The grass outside the asylum was wet with a faint drizzle from the pitch-black sky. No stars were to be seen, and the night was closing in on the city below the hill, thousands of lights winking out one after one like cats' eyes in the dark, leaving only spreading spiderwebs of advertising and traffic lights amidst a viscid, consuming darkness. The two persons huddled together in the old shed a short way from the slope couldn't see more than a few dozen feet before everything vanished in the moist, cold night air, webbed with the grasping silhouettes of gnarled trees.

In the shed, amidst mountains of rusting tools and rotting wood, the only signs of life were a constant groaning, interspersed with sharp intakes of breath. Something with the intensity of a penlight was shining on a woman in the corner, her face covered in drying blood and sweat. An impromptu eyepatch, made of a strip of cotton cloth holding a folded piece of old, yellowing wool in place over her left eye, was drawn tight across her face. The wool was soaked with the brownish-red hue of dried blood, and a yellow-white liquid was pooling at the corner of her eye.

"Oh fuck... there's nothing here... goddamnit, goddamnit..."

A man's voice, rough from crying, was sounding from between the storage boxes.

"It's okay. We can do it that way, okay? I already decided."

The woman's voice was weak and wheezing, though she sounded acutely aware of the situation.

"...if you want it, Angela. If you want it. So, here goes..."

The man spread out the contents of a wooden crate out over the earthen floor. He picked up an old, tarnished spoon and a half-full jug of cooking oil, poured a bit of oil into the spoon, and started heating it with a Bunsen burner. The sputtering flame lighting his worn-out face showed more worry than bravery, and both tears and sweat were dripping down his chin.

"We shouldn't do this. We should go to a doctor. They'll fix you right up, and you'll be able to get some help afterwards, I'm sure. If we do this, it'll probably kill you. I don't wanna make you suffer."

Angela laughed, a sound that drifted off into a vague, formless vacuum of sound.

"If we go to the doctor, they'll do the math and have us either arrested or put on death row. We'll be lucky if it's just filed as attempted murder,

not a terrorist act. It wasn't that subtle, after all. So we have to do this. If we don't, this'll kill me given the time. I got all sorts of shit in it. Dirt, sweat, a bit of vomit, my blood, Adam's blood. At least try, Ben."

Ben's hands were shaking as the oil began warming up, the Bunsen burner casting a sickly orange-yellow light that seemed to intensify every shadow in the shack.

"I'll do it. I... I'm doing it now. Don't hate me for this."

He took off Angela's improvised eyepatch, pretending not to hear her whimpering when the dried blood and sweat was pulled off her ruined eye. Her whole eyeball seemed to roll upwards, covered in a pinkish-yellow mix of blood and viscous fluids. It was ripped almost in two, not a clean cut, but a dripping, drying-out gash that marred her face beyond imagination.

He moved the spoonful of oil closer to her face, almost touching her eyelashes.

"Don't be stupid. If you do this, it'll heal up better than if it gets infected. Once I get over the blood loss, I'll be up again in no time. So you - "

Ben spilled a drop of oil from the spoon onto Angela's face, and she whimpered and sucked in air through her teeth.

"Just now, stupid, do - "

He inserted the edge of the spoon below Angela's eye. Whatever stoicism she might have had before vanished when the hot oil touched her eye, the spoon being slowly moved up to her optic nerve by Ben's shaking hands.

Angela's composure held for the first half of a second, wherein her right eye began tearing up. After that single moment, the quiet night air was ripped apart by her agony, shrieking and wheezing for breath, broken for a single second by a choking sob.

It was over after about twenty seconds, faster than it started. Angela was dripping with sweat, gagging and vomiting up stomach acid on the dirtied ground. After regaining composure, she forced herself up, walking unsteadily towards a box by Ben's side and bending down, nearly falling over, to take out a simply made leather eyepatch with a patch of cleaned wool on the inside, still smelling faintly of rubbing alcohol. Pulling at the strap on the back, she turned her head to the left, then to the right. A tug at the back convinced her that it fit.

"Good going, Ben. It's a little tight, but... ugh. I think I'm gonna black out for a bit. Let's see if I can survi - lessee if I ca... sur..."

She began slurring her words, and her one remaining eye glossed over. Ben caught her as she lost her balance, holding her over his knee as she vomited up the last contents of her stomach. He held her as her dry heaves continued for another ten minutes, off and on, and he made sure to position her to avoid her choking on her own tongue during her unconsciousness.

Only as her eye closed, and she began breathing calmly, could he sleep.


	33. God Of Ashes

A/N: Gurrgh.

Forgive me for the short chapter and too FUCKING MANY OC'S.

Chapter 2-10: God of Ashes

Downtown Seattle, 12th October 2010, 2:39 AM

The ground was covered with yellowed cigarette butts and empty beer cans. The alley was enclosed on both sides by towering buildings, blurry shadows moving around behind the dirtied windows. Graffiti covered the walls, but still could not conceal the bare concrete below so many streaks of paint. Only one flickering streetlight was to be seen, and the cramped alley seemed like an oasis of silence in the ocean that was a living city, pulsing with a sick vitality. The sky was nearly invisible, cut through by the razor wires of power lines spreading like so many veins, slowly pulsing their life into the organism they sustained.

Frank Willis took a final, long wheeze of his cigarette, nearly burning his fingers on the filterless remnant of tobacco. Spitting out the last bits of rolling paper and tobacco, he breathed in deeply, tightened his loosened tie, adjusted his collar and spoke.

"Judging from the amount of blood and the witness accounts - claws and teeth and the like - I'd have to say the culprit isn't human at all." The two assistants stationed at the entrance to the alleyway sighed and rolled their eyes.

"There goes ol' van Helsing again. I bet he's gonna tell us it's a werewolf."

"Well, at least he's good for a laugh. Since people stopped writing private eye noir novels, he's been the best source of ridiculous clichés around here."

Willis stared up towards the buildings overhead, signs advertising loan companies and massage parlours reflected in his eyes. He brushed a stray strand of hair out of his eyes and pulled out a titanium-finish flask from his coat pocket.

"Say what you want, men, but sometimes the unexplainable is the only explanation. How'd you explain ten eyewitnesses speaking of dagger-length claws and a mouth full of canine teeth?"

The oldest of the assistants, a heavily stubbled man who looked like wearing a badge caused him physical pain, leaned up against the wall and laughed, the sound hoarse and devoid of humor.

"Seemingly, they didn't bother teaching you witness psychology, van Helsing. The eyewitnesses were members of the same group, a bunch of

shit-for-brains gangbangers. They'd have made each other believe. That's how it works."

Willis took a long swig from his flask, a trickle of bourbon dripping down into his rough stubble. He tapped the flask with a nail and swore under his breath when it only yielded a hollow, ringing sound.

"They separated. Even the ones who broke off said it could've been a lycanthrope."

The stubbled assistant groaned and rubbed his eyes.

"Okay, so it's a werewolf. Doesn't explain why the only man they put on the case is a fucking alcoholic. If they want to solve it, heap it on a newbie. If all the cases are this obvious, it's child's play."

Willis stepped forward, letting the lone streetlight illuminate him. The light laid itself over his mussy hair and drawn face like a curtain. His eyes were slightly unfocused, and his beige coat had been left open to show a white shirt peppered with burn marks.

"So call me an alchy. I'm not a good detective either. But I believe. There's something out there. For starters, the body's gone. If you know what to assume, it's all easy. Take the case if you want. Come to think of it, go ahead. I'll take it at my own pace. If you believe you can solve it, try. Let's see if the guy who had to try only once to get in beats the guy who scraped the new depths of low the first two times."

The Internet, floating .us domain

diaries of the hunt

jace helped us find a new domain again. makes me grateful for having created him on a whim

nessie is still having a freakout. at least we're still able to put out pics for all of you

this time we saw that the cops were fucking pussies. went down just as easy as the others

got a car, going to seattle

nessie said that hunter bitch is there now. everyone from the bbs, her name is angela weber

kill her if you see her and nessie will pay you twenty grand

jason's gonna be at the hs party tomorrow night

bring us one grand and we'll fix you up

so here are the pics:

Download folder rljps containing and 26 others: link


	34. Storm Without An Eye

A/N: MOUNTAIN DEW VOLTAGE AND A PINT CAN OF ROCKSTAR.

I am scraping the skies right now. Excuse the ways it might affect my writing quality.

Not the same Jason, so dun think too hard about it. Trying to save names.

Chapter 2-11: Storm Without An Eye

A Street in a Middle-Class Seattle Neighborhood, 12th October 2010, 9:36 PM

The air was thick with a chill mist that condensed onto everything in the area.

Someone was shouting not very far away, a mixture of a celebratory exclamation and a drunken scream.

A bunch of kids were standing around the wall of a nearby school building, oddly quiet compared to their friends who could be heard clearly even from behind closed doors.

Two girls, clearly dressed for an indoor popularity show rather than the chilly Washington outdoors, were impatiently tapping their feet and chewing on their cigarette filters.

The tallest of the two, a girl in an open fur-collared jacket and badly done black hair dye, searched around in her pocket for something, and judging by her scowl, she wasn't too happy that it was still there.

"Where the hell did that bitch go? I brought the money. You did too, right?"

The other girl, a brown-haired, skinny kid just out of her tween years, tugged her jacket a little further down and shivered, muttering under her breath before speaking.

"What ya think? Course I did. If they got Jace with them, I trust them."

Someone slinked out from behind a wall, creeping up beside the girls.

"We're here. Happy?"

The brown-haired girl nearly bit her smoke in half as the shady figure tapped her on the shoulder. She took a few moments to calm herself down, then sneered at the person in front of her.

"Fuck off. It's not I wanna talk to you, bitch. Where's Jace gone? You know, right?"

The figure was lit up by a flickering motion-sensor lamp clicking on under the school roof. She was skinny and dressed in a black hoodie, jeans and army surplus boots, a thick cloud of clove-scented smoke billowing from the cigarette between her lips. She'd pulled her hood down over her eyes, which seemed to serve no practical purpose with people who already knew her.

Three tall silhouettes, also clad in mostly black, closed in from opposing ends of the street.

The girl in the hoodie took a deep pull of her clove cigarette, blowing a thin stream of smoke out between her lips for several seconds, obviously savoring her temporary position of power as long as it lasted.

"Don't you worry. I'm gonna tell you where Jason is. We're not stupid enough to set you up. So, you got the money?"

The two girls looked at each other, scowled and pulled out their wallets.

The brown-haired one fished a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills out of her pocket and began counting.

"You asked for one grand and two hundred? Fuck you to hell."

The hooded girl stifled a smug laugh and spat the rest of her cigarette out onto the cracked pavement.

"Fork it over. This is on our terms."

The three shadowy figures behind her had stopped being threatening and had begun talking to each other, but the implication of three guys and only two skinny high-schoolers didn't elude the girls, who took out the money, folded it and handed the bills to the girl in the hoodie.

"Good, good. The deal is done now." Her face split in a wide grin that showed her teeth and made her eyes just thin slots in her face, filled with giddy expectation. "I'm gonna tell you what happened to your widdle Jason. Do you believe in ghosts?"

The black-haired girl gave an incredulous stare and spat out, "Are you fucking with us? We're gonna get that fucking money back and teach your little gothy buddies a thing or two, you wannabe vampire."

The girl flicked back her hood, showing short, mussy hair, a slightly bent nose and a missing earlobe on her right ear. She pulled a new cigarette out of a crumpled plastic envelope, held it between her teeth and lit up, obviously taking her own sweet time with the whole thing.

"Wannabe? That's where you've got it wrong, you braindead whores."

The two girls looked at each other for a second, then burst out laughing.

"So you're saying you're fucking Dracula? Then we're vampire hunters!" The brown-haired tween pulled out a small cross necklace from beneath her shirt collar, gaining no reaction from the short-haired girl except for a slightly annoyed expression.

"Since you seem to think I'm so fucking funny, sit back and listen. It's not nice for us to get a cross shoved in our face, but if you're not the Pope or some born-again who really believes in it, you can shove it right up your ass. Nine out of ten times, if you flail that thing at me, I can walk right over and rip your head off."

Those words incited another half-minute fit of laughter, broken by the black-haired girl.

"See what I said, Claire? She's finally gone out there. "Rip our heads off"... oh fuck, I'd love to see her get locked up for that."

The girl in black took the clove cigarette out of her mouth, ashed it and leaned up against a railing two feet away.

"I said, sit back and listen. You should have guessed by now why we brought you here at the party. Jason told us to get you out here with one grand each for him. He needs money to buy blood packs and duct tape for his friends, so they turned me and got me out here to fetch the girls who were always cuddling cute little Jace."

As expected, Claire and her friend began laughing again, this time a little less hysterically. No matter how hard they tried to seem disbelieving, they couldn't conceal their interest.

"So. You're saying Jace is a ...a vampire or someshit, and that he made you into one so he could make us into them too? Seriously, this is not funny anymore. Go talk to someone who can help you. It's seriously scary."

Claire turned to walk away, but gasped and reached up to touch her shoulder. Somehow, her hand couldn't quite seem to touch, like something invisible was resting on her shoulder. Her friend opened her mouth, but it was left flapping in fear when someone faded into existence, hooking a tartan-shirted arm around Claire's shoulder. A short, blond boy with ruffled hair, blue eyes and just the faintest hint of stubble had appeared behind her, a beatific smile on his face as he hooked his left arm around her shoulder, catching her in a disturbingly intimate embrace from behind.

"I think I owe you the favor, really. That... one... night..."

He panted out the last three words into her face, his breath leaving none of the expected white clouds. While his voice was unsettlingly suggestive, his smug smile couldn't be anything further from that.

The girl in the hoodie stood back and smirked while the boy licked Claire's collarbone with a dry tongue that left no trail of saliva. As he finally ripped into her throat with a savagery absolutely unfitting to his suave demeanor, the girl turned her head away and shielded her face in an excessively theatrical gesture.

Claire's friend had taken advantage of the situation and started running. She squeezed into a gap between two buildings, pulled out her cell phone and began typing her home number.

The phone fell out of her hand, and something else hit the earth with a dull scattering sound. She froze for a moment, whereafter her pupils widened in panic. Her teeth began chattering, and she began whimpering under her breath.

Blood was rapidly pooling all over her bare legs, spilling onto the ground as she helplessly tried to pick up her phone.

A flick knife was lodged in the dirt beside her, wet with blood. Obviously in denial, she fumbled for her now-ruined cell phone until her hand hit something. That very instant, all the color drained from her face and her hands began shaking uncontrollably, the stumps of her fingers splattering blood and dirt all over the brick walls. The knife had managed to slice off seven of her fingers, now scattered on the ground and rapidly paling as the blood flowed out of them. Her right little finger was hanging on by a thin thread of flesh, tugging at her wound every time she so much as flinched. Her whimpering faded as she finally comprehended what was going on, pawing at the stumps on her right hand with her left, fingerless hand. She choked back vomit for a few seconds, then let out an ear-splitting shriek, tapering out into ululating, panicked gibbering. As she attempted to form words, glancing madly over her shoulder, the passage was darkened by someone stepping in between the buildings, pulling out a longer knife.

"You need to control yourself, Lily. For every single chick that Jace goes around turning, there's one more that we have to kill."

The voice was female and oddly ageless - the speaker seemed to switch from a mature tone to a petulant, disgruntled plea in the middle of the sentence.

"Fine, you can call me Lily and all, but would you please not do it when you're about to play skip rope with someone's guts? It creeps me out to be compared to the person who taught you how to do that."

Someone else was speaking, someone else with that peculiar tone of voice. A young woman's voice, though with the sharp edge of a spoiled child who was used to having her way.

"I'm not gonna stop, you know. That name just won't go out of my brain. If you'll excuse me, there's someone I need to show my respect to."

The person walked further into the passage, her long, curling hair billowing down past her shoulders. Claire's friend was growing paler still, fumbling at the ground with fingerless hands and only getting dirt in and blood out.

The long-haired girl grabbed the girl's bloodstained collar, pulling downwards and ripping her clothes open in a single tug.

"I'm not going to apologize. I can't say sorry, because Lily would never be sorry for this."

She turned her face towards the sky, then shook her head slightly and looked into the ground.

"Watch what your Nessie's gonna do. We're always gonna be friends."

Renesmee ran her fingers gingerly across the girl's chest, causing her to look up in confusion.

"Sorry, but you're not going to get any."

With a hard thrust of her hands, Renesmee smashed her hands into the girl's chest. She easily splintered the sternum, grabbed onto the ribs and ignored the girl's gurgling screeches.

"Don't you worry, this is gonna be fast. We can't have the cops coming over."

Renesmee wrenched her hands outward, ripping open the girl's ribcage and exposing a bleeding, pulsing mass of organs. The screaming was almost inhuman now, a throat-flaying cry of absolute panic that ended with a gurgle when Renesmee stomped her shoe into the girl's heart and left lung. Using her stance as leverage, she ripped free ten of the girl's ribs, tearing off a huge lump of flesh from her back with it.

When the girl's eyes had lost what life remained in them, she threw away the slabs of flesh and bone, flicking them onto the roof with an effortless throw.

"They're gonna be trying for ages to find out how this happened. With some luck, they'll arrest some guy who looks burly enough to rip someone's ribcage apart. Now the problem is to find some new clothes."

The other figure closed in from the entrance of the passage. Surveying the carnage with detached interest, she looked up at Renesmee with a smile on her face.

"Y'know, you'll have to admit that it's kinda sick naming me after a dead chick. But if this is what she asked you to do" - Renesmee nodded while mangling the girl's identifying features with her knife - "I'd really love to fill her role. What do you say? I bet you I can off someone in a more fucked-up way than this one. After all, you gave me the right to do it."

The girl called Lily looked towards the sky, between the bloodstained brick walls and up into the clouded sky.

"You've given me a new perspective on existence, Nessie. Trust me on that. Sure, Jace is awesome as a vampire, but the coolest thing is that I don't need to be human anymore."

She chuckled a bit under her breath and stroked a knife handle sticking out of her coat pocket.

"I'm gonna bathe in guts until someone kills me, and I know you'll do the same."


	35. The Truth as Temporarily Established

Chapter 2-12: The Truth as Temporarily Established

A/N: It's late, and I've got to study tomorrow. Oh fuck it.

"So everything's cleared up?"  
Alice sat on the desk in the middle of the office, her feet dangling just an inch off the ground. Contrary to Jenna, who was torn up and covered in scar tissue as her wounds healed, Alice's clothes were clean and her face unblemished. Only her right hand and sleeve had been dirtied by blood, covering her arm up to the shoulder. I honestly didn't want to contemplate how she'd managed to do that.  
Jenna's nod was something between grudging agreement and murderous bitterness. Her arms were crossed in the manner of a petulant child, but her eyes seethed with a pent-up rage that no child should ever deserve to feel.  
"If you wanna hear the sound of your own voice that bad, Wonderland reject, then speak the fuck up. Give me something I can use."  
I noticed her use of the word "I" – not "we". She obviously wasn't too pleased with the fact that I was allied with Alice, nor that I had yanked her away from what to her must have been two free kills.  
Alice leaned backward, seemingly finding a point of equilibrium in thin air. She corrected her clothes in an unnecessarily theatrical fashion before speaking.  
"I'm going to talk for a bit, so sit back and enjoy the exposition."  
I thought I saw a hint of that familiar Alice smirk, but I was almost sure I was mistaken when I looked at her face a second later.  
"So, Jennifer, first things first. You've probably heard the intro to being a vampire a thousand times in the movies, so I'll make it quick. Crosses, silver, hawthorn, garlic, running water, millet seeds, whatever, don't do shit. Well, there are exceptions, and as you'll hear in a bit, a little uncertainty."  
Indeed, Jenna seemed to have heard it before. She was juggling a hunter's knife in the same showy way as a child might draw in class, just to underline that she wasn't listening.  
"Sunlight and fire are bad news. I dunno what a stake through the heart does yet, but they'll have to be able to get it in first. Way too many people nowadays think a stake is something you can hammer in by hand. We still have ribs even though we're not human, you know."  
Fire? Well, that was news to me. I'd have to remember that. Not that I'd like being burned in the first place.  
"You have to drink blood to survive, of course. You'll also need it to raise your body to higher levels of performance. If you're ever going to try a stunt like fighting off such a huge bunch of torch-and-pitchfork-wielding Catholics again – " Alice smirked grudgingly for a split second – "you better be well fed."  
So Aro wanted us to exhaust our store of blood simply to fight him? Fine, I'd do that. It didn't really matter to me if I had to kill someone, not if I could survive to turn Aro into ash.  
Alice sent a look in my direction, tinged with a sort of detached curiosity.  
"Now, let's get to the crunch. Aro has done this, of course. Thing is, he doesn't quite seem to have control of it. There are some things I'd count as blessings more than curses in all this – we can pass as human, we can augment our strength with blood, and as far as I've seen, we've gotten more versatile. Of course, this isn't good news – if Aro himself has to compromise, it's not going to be pleasant. Also – Bella, come here for a minute."  
Alice beckoned me over lazily – in itself a typical Alice gesture, but the distance that permeated the movement gave it a distinct awkward feeling.  
"This mostly concerns you. I think you must have noticed that you were feeling quite much weaker after all that happened."  
"Yeah. I was out running with Jenna, and well, I only did the 15-second mile."  
I smirked at my own bad joke, but it must have had come out in an unnerving way, since Alice flinched a bit and widened her eyes.  
"There's a reason for that. Back in the days, you must have wondered where all the blood we drank went. Well, I've checked back in the day – " she grimaced, recalling an undoubtedly painful experience – "and back then, our main area of storage, if you can say that, was in our chest cavities. In the area around our hearts, to be specific. Now, though, it's – well, show, don't tell."  
With the same frightening grace I remembered, she conjured a scalpel from somewhere in her clothing and aligned it parallel to the artery in her left wrist. With an unnervingly practiced movement, she slipped the blade through her flesh, seemingly without any pain at all. She put the scalpel aside on the desk and used her thumb and index finger to pull the cut apart.  
"See?"  
Only a small trickle of darkish blood, slow like sap, came from either end of the blood vessel. Her exposed muscle tissue was a sickly pale pink, the color of the gills of a rotting fish, dotted with tiny red spots which I took to be clotted capillaries.  
"It seems that in this state, the blood rests in our whole system when it's not in use. If you've experienced any weakness, it might be due to the blood taking time to move from your chest cavity out into your whole body."  
She pinched shut the cut, pushing out a single drop of deep red blood, already beginning to coagulate outside the preservative effect of her system. Her flesh knit together seamlessly, leaving no trace of the inch-deep incision she'd made.  
"About our abilities, it's a long story. Your friend might like to listen."  
"…no thanks. I don't want to cause too much trouble right now. Touchy moment, I think."  
Alice smiled mildly at my comment, for once without any obvious trace of bitterness.  
"To tell you the truth, I haven't always had the ability to see into the future. That's mostly practice. What you saw before you met me again – I'll keep it short – is what I could do originally. Transfer of sensory input. Why I can do it again, I dunno. I thought I shoved it away with all the stuff from back then, but no matter."  
Even if I'd somehow considered committing the unspeakable gaffe of asking Alice what "the stuff from back then" was, her expression would surely have stopped me. She was trying to keep a smile on her face, but the corners of her eyes were twitching and her pupils wide in abject fear. There was no sadness in that expression, no regret, no anger. Only pure, unadulterated horror filled her eyes, and she was wringing her hands, before folded upon her lap, with an obsessive rhythm I'd never expected of her.  
"Okay, Jennifer."  
Alice seemed to empty out all her emotion into that one name, churning it out in a disdainful, vitriolic sneer, somehow still with a smile on her face. Jenna looked up at her, obviously pissed that she'd been distracted from what she was doing – attempting to juggle daggers thrown to a height of twenty feet right outside the window.  
"Hope you have something I wanna know this time, whore. Tell me something I need."  
Jenna's answer held none of Alice's passionate vitriol, instead just an offhand hostility and a gratuitous insult. Alice pretended to ignore it and started talking.  
"I'm gonna tell you about the others of our kind in the area. Listen up, and listen good.  
Jasper and Emmett just finished having their fun. I can't even remember their body count, but what I know for sure is that a newbie like you has no chance of taking on the police. A shotgun blast to the head can still be lethal, and you should remember that."  
Jenna seemed equal measures ticked off at Alice's insult and miffed at having her immortality doubted, but kept quiet.  
"Renesmee… well, she's keeping some interesting company. Seems the first newborn she created was killed, and now she's trying to avenge her. Basic stuff, if you don't look at the people she's got tagging along. She's been creating new vampires right and left, and they're all dangerous."  
I should have been worried. Nessie was my daughter, after all. Yes, I could feel some kind of worry, an instinctive reaction to having something of mine threatened, but the true worry just wouldn't show itself, and neither would the care about not being able to feel anything about it.  
"Edward's… well, I'm not sure if he's been getting better or not. He's sure been getting quieter. Before, he was wrecking the place and screaming about having no soul. He's calmed down now, but I'm still not sure."  
Edward… somehow, I didn't feel that strongly for him either. This had become a battle against Aro, and anyone who let Aro's tricks get to him was being a burden.  
"Everything else… well, we'll just have to go out and look – I was getting hungry anyway. This isn't half boring." 


	36. Burning Bridges

A/N: Sorry.  
Also, Lucky ended up reminding me of Jan Valentine in this chapter.  
Thus, I am even sorrier.

Chapter 2-13: Burning Bridges

A Back Alley behind a Seattle High School, 12th October 2010, 10:19 PM

"So what's actually supposed to happen? I mean, do you really believe that…"  
The place was less a back alley than a tunnel. The factory across the alley from the school had seemingly intruded upon the space left in the already cramped passage, leaving a narrow passageway about six feet high and two feet across. The walls were covered in cut-off wire scraps, smashed meters and broken gauges, the outdated leftovers of a bygone age. The flooring consisted of a few sheets of oil-smeared plywood bridging the pits in the filthy mud.

The person speaking was a girl in her late teens, dressed a tad too properly for a high-school party. She wore her brown hair in a thick braid, and her face was spattered with a few freckles.  
"I mean, we came here as a joke, right? What are we gonna do if that guy actually shows up?"  
A few more youths squeezed into the alley through the torn wire fence behind the janitor's storage closet. The tallest among them, a boy with short brown hair and a few unruly spots of scraggly beard, tried to reply calmly, but couldn't hide the excitement in his voice.

"What we're gonna do? We're gonna hope he's telling the truth. If not, I don't think he expected us to come packing. You've brought yours, right?"  
The girl nodded slowly, her breath quickening. She patted her handbag, producing the dull rattle of metal against metal.  
The boy's mouth twitched slightly, seemingly balancing on the edge between excitement and fear. After a few seconds, though, he decided to settle on the former.  
"You've even brought ammo? Awesome! What're you packing?"  
The girl sneered, an expression that slipped dangerously close to a pout at the end.  
"My brother's a cop. They had a change of equipment not too long ago, and this one just kinda got lost in the commotion, I guess. They never really asked for it back. I think it's a Sig-Sauer."

A red-haired young man in a scuffed beige sports jacket and black slacks wormed his way through the gap in the fence, obviously trying to affect authority by standing up, clapping his hands and shouting for attention.  
"Okay! Shut up and get in here. Most of us don't know each other, okay? Let's get the introductions over with before we start. I'm Ryan. Let's get Romeo and Juliet over there, yeah?"  
The girl blushed a bit, while the boy beside her just looked self-satisfied, trying not to smile.  
"I'm Irene. And well, this is Philip. We're not, you know, together."  
Ryan snorted and whipped around to the others, his long hair swinging with him.

"Looks like these two really have the whole promise-ring thing going on. So what are… wait. I just gotta get one thing straight. How many of you people came here because they believed what that bloke wrote on the BBS?"  
Two people raised their hands in the back.  
"Well, fuck me with a lawnmower. That makes two out of …eight, nine, and ten. Damn, you showed up after all. That's better than we usually get with offline meetings. Normally, we'd have fifty people on the list and only three who showed up. Thirteen out of twenty-eight ain't bad."

Ryan fished around in his spacious jacket, coming out with a can of lager. He opened it, inhaled half of it and put it aside on an electric meter with its gibs hanging out, all in one continuous movement.  
A black-haired girl in a noncommittal blend of denim and leather raised a hand halfway, but decided to simply speak instead.  
"Well, er, are you gonna die drunk? I wouldn't like that. It seems… dirty."  
Ryan thumped his fist against his forehead and groaned.  
"Okay, as I was gonna say, how many of you thought this was a fucking group suicide? Be honest, you emo fucks."  
Most everyone raised their hands. After a few seconds of hesitation, Irene raised hers too.  
"Okay, Juliet. Speak for the group. Try not to whine too hard, m'kay?"

Irene cleared her throat about five times more than necessary and fiddled with the straps on her handbag.  
"Well, I thought this was something like a metaphor. Dying and coming back again, I mean, it sounds like something religious. And if I'm gonna die, I can as well do it in faith that I'll end up someplace nice."  
Philip tried to get words out, but ended up simply staring at Irene for ten seconds before talking.  
"What? I mean, why? This was a dare, right? We were going out here to see if that vampire bloke showed up. It was all fun, right?"  
Irene managed to form the first half of a "You have to understand" before Ryan broke in with his typical decorum.  
"Shut the fuck up, emo girl. We're here to do what Romeo said. We wait 'till that vampire bloke comes by, and then we'll see if he can walk the walk. That counts for all of you. If he actually is a vampire, then you can kill yourself a second time. Capisce?"  
Despite the insulted muttering from the rest of the youths, Ryan won out through simple initiative, being the only one who had the tactlessness to issue commands.

"So now we wai-"  
Ryan was ironically interrupted by the thump of leather on wood as someone dropped down from the factory roof, landing with a disturbing ease.  
The person stood up and pulled back her hood, showing a gaunt, drawn face with a broken nose and a missing earlobe. She held a crumpled cigarette between her teeth, and her hair was short and tufty, seemingly cut with a rather unorthodox instrument. Her teeth were bared in a wide rictus grin, and her sulfur-yellow eyes flashed with playful malice.

"So you were planning on killing yourselves, darlings? That won't do. We need you, you know."  
Her voice was somewhere between sugar and vitriol, a smug sneer exacerbated by exaggerated body language.  
Ryan flinched and took a few steps back, but managed to regain his composure and speak.  
"W-well, that's their fault. I came prepared."  
The girl laughed to herself, something more akin to a wheezing growl than anything else.  
"That's fine, boss. For the rest of you, I'm Avers, and I'll be intruding on your private lives starting tonight."

The black-haired girl who'd spoken before stepped forward, stuttering out a few half-formed sentence fragments before managing to speak coherently.  
"You were, I mean, you said – "  
She stumbled a bit over the confidence she tried to call up, but got into it after a few tries.  
"You said you were a vampire, right? That was why we met you here. Prove you are, and we'll trust you."  
Avers laughed again, openly now. She continued for fifteen seconds before breaking down in giggles and wiping imaginary tears from her eyes.  
"That's what I like to hear. You'll make a good member. So what do you want me to show?"  
The girl thought for a moment, and then said, "Crosses. Let's try."

Avers' smile vanished in the blink of an eye, replaced by a wild-eyed grimace and bared teeth. She stepped forward, past an admittedly quite paralyzed Ryan, and grabbed the girl by the throat. She squeezed just hard enough to make an impression, and then lifted her two feet off the ground.  
Avers' fingers tightened around the girl's throat, constricting until she was gasping for air.  
"Don't try to fuck with me. You think you're so fucking clever, huh? Well, I'm under no obligation to baby you here. I'm treating you nice because I don't feel like killing mortals today. Get in line and act nice, or we'll have you turned and let out in the world without knowing fuck-all. You're in way over your head here. To use a cliché, you have no idea who you're dealing with."  
Avers let go of the girl's throat, leaving her hacking and wheezing on the ground. Letting her gaze run over the scared teens in front of her, she cracked her fingers and smiled with her usual false sweetness.

"So, is anyone else gonna make a fuss, or can I get on with what I was doing?"  
Not even a whisper came from the crowd, and Avers intensified her smirk.  
"Fan-_tas-_tic. Now, since we seem to have an incapacitated member here, is anyone else up for asking questions? Just don't try something stupid like this broad, or I won't be as nice."  
Irene half-raised a hand, and Avers pointed her out in the manner of a malicious teacher calling out the least prepared student.  
"Well, er, yeah, vampires live forever, right? So if I become one, I can get a second chance, or is there some catch?"  
Avers shrugged and smirked, her eyes narrowing into yellow slits.

"You'll get it all for free, Juliet. You'll be immortal, you'll be stronger and you'll have powers humans could never dream of. It's a win-win deal. We just went through a …merger, if you will, and we need recruits. We promise to treat you nicely."  
Philip grabbed Irene's arm, but said nothing. She continued talking, eyes lit up by a fervor that overshadowed everything else.  
"What'll I be able to do, then? What about making people do what I tell them to?"  
Avers snorted and threw her arms out in a gesture of mock surrender.  
"Well, that's Lucky's territory. He's my new boss, so if he decides to turn you, I have no say in it. I'm mostly good at the whole predator shtick. You know, moving fast as fuck, turning into mist, you name it."

Ryan's head whipped up at Avers' words, curiosity in his eyes.  
"Could you turn me, then? That's what I'm aiming for."  
Avers' expression flipped between disappointment and excitement multiple times, before finally settling on the latter.  
"One death of unnecessary humanity, one birth of a predator. You and I are gonna get along just fine. For now, I have another thing to tend to, though."  
Avers' smile went back to her usual rictus grin, a hint of growling laughter building in her throat.  
"Lucky! You take Juliet. I'll take mouthy van Helsing here."  
"As ya command, newbie."

Philip's face sank from its previous expression of concerned fear into one of smug amusement. His facial features blurred and warped, settling into those of a sallow, bearded man in his late twenties. His body convulsed and shivered, the clothes on his back tearing and rearranging. His arms and legs lengthened, his shoulders broadened and his ribcage reconfiguring itself into a thinner shape with a sickening creaking and groaning.  
Where Philip had been before, Lucky now stood, cigarette in mouth and lazy grin on his face. He leaned in close to the terrified Irene, breathing smoke and cold breath in her face.  
"Take no offense. We jus' make a principle out of givin' people an eye-opener before lettin' them into the Volturi. You wouldn't need your boyfriend anymore, anyway. He tasted – "  
Lucky let the cigarette drop from between his lips.  
" – rather goddamn terrible."

Lucky pressed Irene against the wall, making a big deal out of covering her ears from the crunching and ripping that had started from behind them.  
"Oh my. She's a bit tetchy, ain't she? Well, no matter. Time for another new round of recruits. No worry, everyone's gonna survive… kinda sorta. Sure got a good recruiter in that Nessie bitch."  
Lucky removed his hand from Irene's ear, holding it over her mouth.  
"Now don't you think too hard about it. I'm just mutterin' to myself. Revenge is always easy to play on."

"Now goodnight, all of you. If Aro wants to meet the Sleeping One, you've gotta live and die for the Master's words."


End file.
